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ALLEN KELLY 





BEARS I HAVE MET 
—AND OTHERS 


ALLEN KELLY 




Illustrations by Ernest Thompson Seton, 
W. H. Loomis, Homer Davenport, Walt. 
McDougall, Charles Nelan, W. Hofacker, 
Will. Chapin and the Author 


PHILADELPHIA 

DREXEL BIDDLE, PUBLISHER 

1903 





THE LIBRARY OF J 

CONGRESS, | 


I wo Copies 


Received I 


AUG 4 


1903 


Copyright 
CLASS PL 


Entry 
XXc No. 


COPY 


B. 



COPYRIGHT 1903 

BY 

Allen Kelly 

All Rights Reserved 



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CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The California Grizzly 13 

II. The Story of Monarch 29 

III. Chronicles of Clubfoot 48 

IV. Mountain Charley 75 

V. In the Valley of the Shadow 80 

VI. When Grizzlies Ran in Droves 85 

VII. The Adventures of Pike 93 

VIII. In the Big Snow 103 

IX. Boston's Big Bear Fight in 

X. Yosemite 117 

XL The Right of Way 125 

XII. Well Heeled 129 

XIII. Smoked Out 135 

XIV. A Cry in the Night 141 

XV. A Campfire Symposium 150 

XVI. Brainy Bears of the Pecos 162 

XVII. When Monarch was Free 171 

XVIII. How Old Pinto Died 179 

XIX. Three in a Boat 192 

XX. A Providential Prospect Hole 195 

XXI. Killed with a Bowie 200 

XXII. A Denful of Grizzlies 204 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Portrait of the Author. 

Sketch of Monarch. Ernest Thompson Seton. 

•/' The Largest Captive Grizzly. From a Photograph. 

Feasting Upon a Big Steer. A. K. 

Chained to Trees Every Night. 

Prepared to Pluck Foster. W. H. Loomis. 

Long Brown Moved Just in Time. W. H. Loomis. 

The Bear Swung Trap, Chain and Clog. 

W. H. L. and A. K. 

She Lunged Forward to Meet the Charge. 

W. Hofacker. 

A Bully Saddle Bear. Homer Davenport. 

The Bears Inspected the Pigs in Clover. Chas. Nelan. 

Pinto Looked Down on the Platform. Will Chapin. 

Watching the Man in the Tree. Will Chapin. 

The Grizzly Chewed His Arm. A. K. 

He Had Seen the Bears. Walt McDougall. 



PREFACE 



These bear stories were accumulated and 
written during a quarter of a century of in^ 
termittent wanderings and hunting on the 
Pacific Slope, and are here printed in a book 
because they may serve to entertain and amuse. 
Most of them are true, and the others — well, 
every hunter and fisherman has a certain 
weakness, which is harmless, readily detected 
and sympathetically tolerated by others of the 
guild. The reader will not be deceived by 
the whimsical romances of the bear-slayers, 
and he may rest assured that these tales illus- 
trate many traits of the bear and at least one 
trait of the men who hunt him. 

One of the most amiable and well-behaved 
denizens of the forest, Bruin has ever been 
an outlaw and a fugitive with a price on his 
pelt and no rights which any man is bound to 
respect. 



PREFACE 

Like most outlawed men, he has been sup- 
plied with a reputation much worse than he 
deserves as an excuse for his persecution and 
a justification to his murderers. His char- 
acter has been traduced in tales of the fireside 
and his disposition has been maligned ever 
since the female of his species came out of 
the woods to rebuke irreverence to smooth- 
pated age. Every man's hand has been against 
him, but seldom has his paw been raised 
against man except in self-defense. 

A vegetarian by choice and usually by neces- 
sity, Bruin is accused of anthropophagy, and 
every child is taught that the depths of the 
woodland are infested by ravening bears with 
a morbid taste for tender youth. Poor, har- 
ried, timid Ursus, nosing among the fallen 
leaves for acorns and beechnuts, and ready to 
flee like a startled hare at the sound of a foot- 
fall, is represented in story and picture as rag- 
ing through the forest with slavering jaws 
seeking whom he may devour. Yet the man 
does not live who can say truthfully that he 
ever was eaten by a bear. 

Possibly there have been bears of abnormal 

or vitiated tastes who have indulged in human 

flesh, just as there are men who eat decayed 
10 



PREFACE 

cheese and "high" game, but the gustatory sins 
of such perverts may not be visited justly on 
the species. There are few animals so de- 
praved in taste as to dine off man except under 
stress of famine, and Bruin is not one of the 
few. He is no epicure, but he draws the line 
at the lord of creation flavored with tobacco. 

I have a suspicion that some of the tales 
told around campfires and here set down 
might be told differently if the bears could 
talk. It is a pity they can't talk, for they are 
very human in other ways and have a sense 
of humor that would make their versions of 
some "true bear stories" vastly amusing. 
What delightful reading, for example, would 
be the impressions made by a poet of the 
Sierra upon the bears he has met ! Perhaps no 
bear ever met a poet of the Sierra, but mere 
unacquaintance with the subject should be no 
more of a disadvantage to a bear than to a man 
of letters. 



11 



Bears I Have Met 
—and Others. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE CALIFORNIA GRIZZLY. 

The California Grizzly made his reputation 
as a man^killer in the days of the muzzle-load- 
ing rifle, when failure to stop him with one 
shot deprived the hunter of all advantage in 
respect of weapons and reversed their positions 
instantly, the bear becoming the hunter and the 
man the game. In early days, also the Grizzly 
had no fear of man and took no pains to keep 
out of his way, and bears were so numerous 
that chance meetings at close quarters were fre- 
quent. 

But with all of his ferocity when attacked 
and his formidable strength, the Grizzly's re- 
sentment was often transitory, and many men 
owe their lives to his singular lack of persis- 
tency in wreaking his wrath upon a fallen foe. 
Generalizations on the conduct of animals, 
13 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

other than in the matter of habits of life gov- 
erned by what we call instinct, are likely to be 
misleading, and when applied to animals of 
high intelligence and well-developed individu- 
ality, are utterly valueless. I have found the 
Grizzly more intelligent than other American 
bears and his individual characteristics more 
marked and varied, and therefore am disin- 
clined to formulate or accept any rules of 
conduct for him under given circumstances. 
No man can say what a Grizzly will or will not 
do, when molested or encountered, any more 
than he can lay down a general rule for dogs 
or men. One bear may display extreme tim- 
idity and run away bawling when wounded, 
and another may be aggressive enough to be- 
gin hostilities at sight and fight to the death. 
It can be said safely, however, that the Griz- 
zly is a far more dangerous animal than the 
Black Bear and much more likely to accept a 
challenge than to run away. 

Want of persistent vindictiveness may not 
be a general trait of the species, but it has been 
shown in so many cases that it is at least a 
quite common characteristic. Possibly it is a 
trait of all bears and the basis of the almost 
universal belief that a bear will not molest a 

14 



THE CALIFORNIA GRIZZLY 

dead man, and that by "playing 'possum" a 
person attacked by a bear may evade further 
injury. That belief or theory has been held 
from the earliest times, and it is by no means 
certain that it is a mere idle tale or bit of nur- 
sery lore. Aesop uses it in one of his fables. 
Two men are assailed by a bear, and one climbs 
a tree while the other throws himself upon the 
ground and feigns death. The bear sniffs at 
the man on the ground, who holds his breath, 
concludes that the man is dead, and goes away. 
The man who climbed the tree rejoins his com- 
panion, and having seen the bear sniffing at 
his head, asks him facetiously what the bear 
said to him. The man who played 'possum 
replies that the bear told him to beware of 
keeping company with those who in time of 
danger leave their friends in the lurch. 

This I do know, that bears often invade 
camps in search of food and refrain from mo- 
lesting men asleep or pretending to be asleep. 
Upon one occasion a Grizzly of very bad repu- 
tation and much feared by residents in his dis- 
trict, came into my camp on a pitch dark night, 
and as it would have been futile to attempt to 
draw a bead on him and a fight would have en- 
dangered two members of the party who were 
15 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

incapable of defending themselves, I cautioned 
everyone to feign sleep and not to show signs 
of life if the bear sniffed in their faces. The 
injunction was obeyed, the bear satisfied bis 
curiosity, helped himself to food and went 
away without molesting anybody. 

And that is not an isolated instance. One 
night a Grizzly invaded a bivouac, undeterred 
by the still blazing fire, and tried to reach a 
haunch of venison hung upon a limb directly 
over one of the party. The man — Saml Sned- 
den, the first settler in Lockwood Valley, Cal. — 
awoke and saw the great beast towering over 
him and stretching up in a vain effort to reach 
the venison, and he greatly feared that in com- 
ing down to all fours again the bear might for- 
get his presence and step upon him. Snedden 
tried furtively to draw his rifle out from the 
blankets in which he had enveloped it, but 
found that he could not get the weapon without 
attracting the bear's attention and probably 
provoking immediate attack. So he abandoned 
the attempt, kept perfectly still and watched 
the bear with half-closed eyes. The Grizzly 
realized that the meat was beyond his reach, 
and with a sighing grunt came down to all 
fours, stepping upon and crushing flat a tin cup 

16 



THE CALIFORNIA GRIZZLY 

filled with water within a foot of the man's 
head. The bear inquisitively turned the crushed 
cup over, smelt of it, sniffed at Snedden's ear 
and slouched slowly away into the darkness as 
noiselessly as a phantom, and only one man in 
the camp knew he had been there except by the 
sign of his footprints and the flattened cup. 

Many hunters have told me of similar ex- 
periences, and never have I heard of one in- 
stance of unprovoked attack upon a sleeping 
person by a bear, or for that matter by any 
other of the large carnivorae of this country. 
Only one authentic instance of a bear feeding 
on human flesh have I known, and that was un- 
der unusual circumstances. 

Two things will be noted by the reader of 
these accounts of California bear fights : First ; 
that the Grizzly's point of attack is usually 
the face or head, and second, that, except in 
the case of she-bears protecting or avenging 
their cubs, the Grizzly ceased his attack when 
satisfied that his enemy was no longer capable 
of continuing the fight, and showed no> dispo- 
sition to wantonly mangle an apparently dead 
man. Since the forty she-bears came out of 
the wilderness :and ate up a drove of small boys 
for guying a holy man, who was unduly sen- 
17 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

sitive about his personal dignity, the female of 
the ursine species, however, has been notorious 
for ill-temper and vindictive pertinacity, and 
she maintains that reputation to this day. 

In the summer of 1850, G. W. Applegate 
and his brother John were mining at Horse 
Shoe Bar on the American River. The near- 
est base of supplies at that time was George- 
town, eighteen miles distant by trail. One even- 
ing in early summer, having run short of pro- 
visions, George and his brother started to walk 
to that camp to make purchases. Darkness 
soon overtook them and while descending into 
Canyon Creek they heard a bear snort at some 
distance behind. In a few moments they heard 
it again, louder than before, and John rather 
anxiously remarked that he thought the bear 
was following them. George thought not, but 
in a few seconds after crossing the stream and 
beginning the ascent upon the other side, both 
distinctly heard him come — splash, splash, 
splash — through the water directly upon their 
trail. 

Note. — For many of the facts in this chapter of ad 
ventures with grizzlies in Placer and El Dorado coun- 
ties in 1850 and 185 1, I am indebted to Dr. R. F. Rooney, 
of Auburn, Cal., who obtained the details at first hand 
from pioneers. — A. K. 

18 



THE CALIFORNIA GRIZZLY 

It was as dark as Erebus, and they were 
without weapons larger than pocket knives — 
a serious position with an angry Grizzly dog- 
ging their steps. Their first thought was to 
climb a tree, but knowing they were not far 
from the cabin of a man named Work, they 
took to their heels and did their best running to 
reach that haven of refuge ahead of their for- 
midable follower. They reached the cabin, 
rushed in, slammed and fastened the door be- 
hind them, and with breathless intervals gasped 
out their tale. Work kept a bar for the sale of 
whiskey, and he and his son, a stout young 
man, with two or three miners, were sitting on 
rude seats around a whiskey barrel playing 
cards when the two frightened men rushed in. 

The cabin was built by planting posts firm- 
ly in the ground at a distance of some three 
feet apart, and in the form of a parallelogram, 
then nailing shakes upon these posts and on 
the roof. The sides were held together by 
cross beams, connecting the tops of the opposite 
posts. There was one rude window, made by 
cutting a hole in the side of the wall about 
four feet from the ground and covering this 
with greased paper, glass being an unattain- 
able luxury. Notwithstanding the belief that 
19 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

there was not a man in those days but wore a 
red shirt and a big revolver, there was not a 
firearm in the place. 

In a few seconds the bear was heard angrily 
sniffing at the door, and an instant later his 
powerful paw came tearing through the frail 
shakes and he poked his head and neck through 
the opening and gravely surveyed the terrified 
party. Every man sprang upon the bar and 
thence to the cross beam with the alacrity given 
only by terror. After sniffing a moment and 
calmly gazing around the room and up at the 
frightened men, the bear quietly withdrew his 
head and retired. 

After an interval of quiet, the men ventured 
down and were eagerly discussing the event, 
when the bear again made its presence known 
by rearing up and thrusting its head through 
the paper of the window. Upon this occasion 
some of the men stood their ground, and young 
Work, seizing an iron-pointed Jacob's staff, 
ran full tilt at the bear, and thrust it deeply 
into its chest. The bear again disappeared, 
taking the Jacob's staff, and appeared no more 
that night. 

The following morning, search being made, 
the bear was found dead some yards from the 
20 



THE CALIFORNIA GRIZZLY 

cabin, with the staff thrust through the heart. 

It proved to be a female and was severely 

wounded in several places with rifle balls. 

Subsequent inquiries elicited the fact that on 

the previous day a party of hunters from 

Georgetown had captured two cubs and 

wounded the mother, which had escaped. This 

was evidently the same bear in search of her 

cubs. 

* * * * 

In the spring of the year, somewhere early 
in the fifties, a party of five left the mining 
camp of Coloma for the purpose of hunting 
deer for the market in the locality of Mosquito 
Canyon. On the morning of the second day 
in camp the party separated, each going his 
own way to hunt, and at night it was found 
that one of their members named Broadus 
failed to appear. The others started out in dif- 
ferent directions to search for him the next 
morning, and after a day spent in fruitless 
searching, they returned to camp only to find 
that another of their number, named William 
Jabine, was this night missing. 

After an anxious night, chiefly spent in dis- 
cussing the probable fate of their missing com- 
panions, the remaining three started out on the 
21 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

trail of Jabine, he having told them the pre- 
vious morning what part of the country he 
was going to travel. Slowly following his 
tracks left in the soft soil and broken down 
herbage, they found him about noon, terribly 
mangled and unconscious, but alive. The flech 
on his face was torn and lacerated in a fright- 
ful manner, and he was otherwise injured in 
his chest and body. 

Further search revealed, near by, the dead 
body of their other missing comrade, seated 
on a bowlder by the side of a small stream 
with his head on his folded arms, which were 
supported by a shelf of rock in front of him. 
His whole under jaw had been bitten off and 
torn away, and a large pool of clotted blood 
at his feet showed that he had slowly bled to 
death after having been attacked and wounded 
by a bear. The ground showed evidences of 
a fearful struggle, being torn up and liberally 
sprinkled with blood for yards around. 

The men carried Jabine to the nearest min- 
ing camp, whence others went to bring in the 
body of Broadus. 

Jabine finally recovered, but he was shock- 
ingly disfigured for life. He afterwards told 
how he came upon the tracks of Broadus, and 
22 



THE CALIFORNIA GRIZZLY 

on reaching the spot where Broadus had re- 
ceived his death wound, he was suddenly at- 
tacked by a huge she-bear that was followed by 
two small cubs. The bear had evidently been 
severely wounded by Broadus and was in a 
terrible rage. She seized Jabine before he 
could turn to flee, and falling with her whole 
weight upon his body and chest, began biting 
his face. He soon lost consciousness from the 
pressure upon his chest, and remembered no 
more. 

The poor fellow became a misanthrope, 
owing to his terrible disfigurement, and wias 
finally found drowned in the river near Colo- 
ma. 

In 1850 a number of miners were camped 
upon the spot where the little town of Todd's 
Valley now stands. Among them were three 
brothers named Gay lord, who had just arrived 
from Illinois. These young men used to help 
out the proceeds of their claim by an occasion- 
al hunt, taking their venison down to the river 
when killed, where a carcass was readily dis- 
posed of for two ounces. 

One evening when the sun was about an 
hour high, one of the brothers took his rifle 
and went out upon the hills and did not return 

23 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

that night. The following morning his two 
brothers set out in search and soon found him 
dead, bitten through the spine in the neck, evi- 
dently by a bear. His rifle was unloaded and 
the tracks showed where he had fled, pursued 
by the angry animal, been overtaken, and 
killed. 

On the succeeding day a hunt was organized 
and some twenty men turned out to seek re- 
venge. The bears, for there were two of them, 
were tracked into a deep rocky canyon running 
from Forest Hill to Big Bar. Large rocks 
were rolled down its sides, and the bears were 
routed out and both killed. 

In 185 1, three men armed with Kentucky 
rifles, which were not only muzzle-loaders, but 
of small calibre and less effective than the or- 
dinary .32 calibre rifle of to-day, were hunting 
deer on the divide between Volcano* and Shirt- 
tail Canyons in Placer county. In the heavy 
timber on the slope they encountered a large 
Grizzly coming up out of Volcano Canyon. 
The bear was a hundred yards distant when 
they saw him and evinced no desire for trouble, 
and two of the hunters were more than willing 
to give him the trail and let him go about his 

business in peace. The other, a man named 
24 



THE CALIFORNIA GRIZZLY 

Wright, who had killed small bears, but knew 
nothing about the Grizzly, insisted on attack- 
ing, and prepared to shoot. The others as- 
sured him that a bullet from a Kentucky rifle at 
that distance would only provoke the bear to 
rush them, and begged him not to fire. But 
Wright laughed at them and pulled trigger 
with a bead on the bear's side, where even a 
heavy ball would be wasted. 

The Grizzly reared upon his haunches, bit 
at the place where the ball stung him, and 
after waving his paws in the air two or three 
times, came directly for Wright with a fierce 
growl. The party all took to their heels and 
separated, but the bear soon overtook Wright 
and with one blow of his paw struck the man, 
face downward, upon the snow and began bit- 
ing him about the head, back and arms. The 
other hunters, seeing the desperate case of 
their companion, rushed up and fired at the 
bear at close range, fortunately killing him 
with a bullet in the base of the brain. 

Wright, on being relieved of the weight of 
his antagonist, sat up in a dazed condition, with 
the blood pouring in streams down his face. 
He had received several severe bites in the back 
and arms, but the worst wound was on the 

25 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

head, where the bear had struck him with his 
claws. His scalp was almost torn from his 
head, and a large piece of skull some three 
inches in diameter was broken out and lifted 
from the brain as cleanly as if done by the sur- 
geon's trephine. 

Strange to say, Wright complained of but 
little pain, excepting from a bite in the arm, 
and soon recovered his senses. His comrades 
replaced the mangled scalp, and bleeding soon 
ceased. A fire was built to keep him warm and 
while one watched with the wounded man the 
other returned to the trail to intercept a pack 
train. On the arrival of the mules, Wright was 
helped upon one of their backs, and rode un- 
aided to the Baker ranch. 

A surgeon was sent for from Greenwood 
Valley, who, on his arrival, removed the loose 
piece of bone from the skull and dressed the 
wounds. The membranes of the brain were 
uninjured, and the man quickly recovered, but 
of course had a dangerous hole in his skull that 
incapacitated him for work. One Sunday, 
some weeks afterward, the miners held a meet- 
ing, subscribed several hundred dollars and 
sent Wright home to his friends in Boston. 

Mike Brannan was a miner on the Piru 

26 



THE CALIFORNIA GRIZZLY 

River in Southern California. The river, or 
creek, runs through a rough mountain district, 
and Brannan' s claim was in the wildest part 
of it. He and his partner met a Grizzly on the 
trail, and Brannan had no better judgment 
than to fire his revolver at the bear instead of 
getting out of the way. The Grizzly charged, 
smashed the partner's skull with a blow and 
tumbled Brannan over a bank. 

Brannan was stunned by the fall, and when 
consciousness returned he saw the bear stand- 
ing across his body, watching him intently 
for signs of life. He tried to keep perfectly 
still and hold his breath, but the suspense was 
too great a strain and involuntarily he moved 
the fingers of his right hand. The bear did 
not see the movement, and when Brannan 
realized that his fingers had just touched his 
revolver, he conceived the desperate idea that 
he could reach the weapon and use it quickly 
enough to blow a hole through the bear's head 
and save himself from the attack which he felt 
he could not avert much longer by shamming. 

To grasp the revolver it was necessary to 
stretch his arm full length, and he tried to do 
that slowly and imperceptibly, but his anxiety 
overcame his prudence and he made a move- 

27 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

ment that the watchful Grizzly detected. In- 
stantly the bear pinned the arm with one paw, 
placed the other upon Brannan's breast and 
with his teeth tore out the biceps muscle. 
Brannan had the good luck to faint at that 
moment, and when his senses again returned 
he was alone. The Grizzly had watched him 
until satisfied that there was no more harm in 
him, and then left him. 

Brannan managed to get to his cabin and 
eventually recovered, only to be murdered 
some years later for the gold dust he had 
stored away. 



28 




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Ernest Thompson Seton's 
Sketch of Monarch 



CHAPTER II. 

THE STORY OF MONARCH. 

Early in 1889, the editor of a San Francisco 
newspaper sent me out to catch a Grizzly. He 
wanted to present to the city a good specimen 
of the big California bear, partly because he 
believed the species was almost extinct, and 
mainly because the exploit would be unique in 
journalism and attract attention to his paper. 
Efforts to obtain a Grizzly by purchase and 
"fake" a story of his capture had proved fruit- 
less for the sufficient reason that no captive 
Grizzly of the true California type could be 
found, and the enterprising journal was con- 
strained to resort to the prosaic expedient of 
laying a foundation of fact and veritable 
achievement for its self-advertising. 

The assignment was given to me because I 
was the only man on the paper who was sup- 
posed to knbw anything about bears. Such 
knowledge as I had, and it was not very ex- 
tensive, had been acquired on hunting trips, 
some successful and more otherwise, in the 

29 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

Sierra Nevada and Cascades. I had had no 
experience in trapping, but I accepted the as- 
signment with entire confidence and great joy 
over the chance to get into the mountains for a 
long outing. The outing proved to be much 
longer than the editor expected, and trapping 
a bear quite a different matter from killing 
one. 

From Santa Paula, I struck into the moun- 
tains of Ventura county with an outfit largely 
composed of information, advice and over-paid 
assistance. The first two months of the trip 
were consumed in developing the inaccuracy of 
most of the information and the utter worth- 
lessness of all the advice and costly assistance, 
and in acquiring some rudimentary knowledge 
of the habits of bears and the art of trapping 
them. Traps were built, under advice, where 
there was not one chance in a thousand of 
catching anything, and bogus bear-tracks, 
made with a neatly-executed model by an in- 
genious guide, who preferred loafing about 
camp to moving it, kept the expedition from 
seeking more promising country. 

The editor became tired of waiting for his 
big sensation and ordered me home. I respect- 
fully but firmly refused to go home bearless, 

30 



THE STORY OF MONARCH 

and the editor fired me by wire. I fired the 
ingenious but sedentary assistant, discarded all 
the advice that had been unloaded upon me by 
the able bear-liars of Ventura, reduced my im- 
pedimenta to what one lone, lorn burro could 
pack, broke camp and struck for a better Griz- 
zly pasture, determined to play the string - out 
alone and in my own way. The place I se- 
lected for further operations was the regular 
beat of old Pinto, a Grizzly that had been 
killing cattle on Gen. Beale's range in the 
mountains west of Tehachepi and above An- 
telope Valley. 

Old Pinto was no myth, and he didn't make 
tracks with a whittled pine foot. His lair was 
a dense manzanita thicket upon the slope of a 
limestone ridge about a mile from the spring 
by which I camped, and he roamed all over the 
neighborhood. In soft ground he made a track 
fourteen inches long and nine inches wide, but 
although at the time I took that for the size 
of his foot, I am now inclined to think that it 
was the combined track of front and hind foot, 
the hind foot "over-tracking' ' a few inches, ob- 
literating the claw marks of the front foot and 
increasing the size of the imprint both in length 
and width. Nevertheless he was a very large 
31 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

bear, and he loomed up formidably in the dusk 
of an evening when I saw him feasting, forty 
yards away, upon a big steer he had killed. 

Pinto had the reputation of being not only 
dangerous but malevolent, and there were oft 
told tales of domiciliary visits paid by him at 
the cabins of settlers, and of aggressive ad- 
vances upon mounted vaqueros,who were saved 
by the speed of their horses. Doubtless the 
bear was audacious in foraging and indifferent 
to the presence of man, but he was not malevol- 
ent. Indeed, I have yet to hear on any credi- 
ble authority of a malevolent bear, or, for that 
matter, any other wild animal in North America 
whose disposition and habit is to seek trouble 
with man and go out of its way with the de- 
liberate purpose of attacking him. For many 
weeks I camped by that spring, much of the 
time alone, and without even a dog, with only 
a blanket for covering and the heavens for a 
roof, and my sleep never was disturbed by any- 
thing larger than a wood rat. My camp was 
on one of Pinto's beaten trails, but he aban- 
doned it and passed fifty yards to one side or 
the other whenever his business took him down 
that way, and he never meddled with me or 
mine. One night, as his tracks showed, he 
32 




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*oe 

c 



THE STORY OF MONARCH 

came to within twenty feet of my bivouac, 
sniffed around inquiringly and passed on. 

I built two stout traps for Pinto's benefit, 
and day after day I dragged bait around and 
through the manzanita thickets on the ridge 
and over all his trails, and sometimes I found 
tracks so fresh that I was satisfied he had heard 
me coming and had turned aside. There were 
cougar and lynx tracks all over the mountains, 
but I seldom saw the animals and then only got 
Meeting glimpses of them as they fled out of 
my way. 

Many of my prejudices and all my story- 
book notions about the behavior of the car- 
nivorae were discredited by experience, and I 
was forced to recognize the plain truth that the 
only mischievous animal, the only creature 
meditating and planning evil on that mountain 
— excepting of course the evil incident to the 
procurement of food — was a man with a gun. 
I was the only really dangerous and unneces- 
sarily destructive animal in the woods, and all 
the rest were afraid of me. 

After a time, because I had no intention of 

killing Pinto if I should meet him, I quit 

carrying a rifle, except when I wanted venison, 

and tramped all over the mountain in daylight 

33 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

or in darkness without giving much thought 
to possible encounters. True, I carried a re- 
volver, but that was force of habit mainly, and 
a six-shooter is company of a sort to a man 
in the wilderness even if he does not expect 
to need it. When one has "packed ai gun" for 
years, he feels uncomfortable without it; not 
because he thinks he has any use for it, but be- 
cause it has become a part of his attire and its 
absence unconsciously frets him and sets him 
wondering vaguely if he has lost his suspend- 
ers or forgotten to put on a tie. 

That the big Grizzly was not quite so au- 
dacious and adventurous as he was reputed 
to be was demonstrated by his suspicious 
avoidance of the traps while they were new to 
him, and it became evident that he could not 
be inveigled into them even by meat and honey 
until they should become familiar objects to 
him and he should get accustomed to my scent 
upon his trails. That I would have caught old 
Pinto in time there is no doubt, for eventually 
he was caught in each o»f the traps, although 
he escaped through the carelessness of the man 
who baited and set them. 

The traps were tight pens, built of large oak 
logs notched and pinned, roofed and floored 

31 



THE STORY OF MONARCH 

with heavy logs and fitted with falling doors 
of four-inch plank. They were stout enough, 
and when I saw them ten years later they were 
sound and fit to hold anything that wears fur, 
although old Pinto had clawed all the bark off 
the logs and left deep furrows in them. 

As a matter of course, all the hunters and 
mountain men for fifty miles around knew that 
I was trying to catch a Grizzly, and some of 
them built traps on their own hook, hoping to 
catch a bear and make a few dollars. I had 
encouraged them by promising to pay well for 
his trouble anybody who should get a bear in 
his own trap, or find one in any of the numer- 
ous traps I had built and send me word. 

Late in October, I heard that a bear had 
got into a trap on Gleason Mountain, and leav- 
ing Pinto to his own devices, I went over to 
look at the captive. The Mexican acting as 
jailor did not know me, and I discovered that 
Allen Kelly was supposed to be the agent of a 
millionaire and an "easy mark," who would 
pay a fabulous sum for a bear. The Mexican 
assured me that he was about to get wealth 
beyond the dreams of avarice for that bear 
from a San Francisco man, meaning said 
Kelly, whereupon I congratulated him, dis- 

35 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

paraged the bear and turned to go. The Mexi- 
can followed me down the trail .and began com- 
plaining that the alleged purchaser of the bear 
was dilatory in closing the deal with cash. He, 
Mateo, was aggrieved by this unbusiness-like 
behavior, and it would be no more than proper 
for him to resent it and teach the man a les- 
son in commercial manners by selling the bear 
to somebody else, even to me, for instance. 
Mateo's haste to get that bear off his hands was 
evident, but the reason for it was not apparent. 
Later I understood. 

Monarch had the bad luck to get into a trap 
built by a little syndicate of which Mateo was 
a member. Mateo watched the trap, while the 
others supplied beef for bait. They were to di- 
vide the large sum which they expected to get 
from me in case they caught a bear before I 
did, and very likely my fired assistant had a 
contingent interest in the enterprise. Mateo 
was the only member of the syndicate on deck 
when I arrived, and deeming a bird in his hand 
worth a whole flock in the syndicate bush, he 
made the best bargain he could and left the 
others to whistle for dividends. Ten years 
afterward I met the cattleman who furnished 
the capital and the beef, and from his stren- 
36 



THE STORY OF MONARCH 

uous remarks about his Mexican partner I in- 
ferred that the syndicate had been deeply dis- 
appointed. I also learned for the first time why 
Mateo was so anxious for me to take the bear 
off his hands when the evident original pur- 
pose was to 1 held me up for a good round sum. 
The hold-up would have failed, however, be- 
cause I had spent more than $1,200 and lost 
five months' time, was nearly broke, did not 
represent anybody but myself at that stage of 
my bear-catching career, and for all I knew 
the editor might have changed his mind about 
wanting a Grizzly at any price. 

Finally I consented to take the bear and 
struck a bargain, and not until money had 
passed and a receipt was to be signed did Mateo 
know with whom he was dealing. He paid me 
the dubious compliment of muttering that I 
was "un coyote," and as that animal is the 
B'rer Rabbit of Mexican folk lore, I inferred 
that the excellent Mateo intended to express 
admiration for the only evidence of business 
capacity to be found in my entire career. That 
dicker for a bear stands out as the sole trade I 
ever made in which I was not unmistakably 
and comprehensively "stuck." Mateo was more 
than repaid for his trouble, however. He 
37 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

helped me build a box, and get the bear into it, 
and I took Monarch to San Francisco and sold 
him to the editor of the enterprising paper, who 
eventually gave him to Golden Gate Park. 

The newspaper account of the capture of 
Monarch was elaborated to suit the exigencies 
of enterprising journalism, picturesque features 
were introduced where the editorial judgment 
dictated, and mere facts, such as the name of 
the county in which the bear was caught, fell 
under the ban of a careless blue pencil and were 
distorted beyond recognition. 

More than one-fourth of Joaquin Miller's 
"True Bear Stories" consists of that newspaper 
yarn, copied verbatim and without amendment, 
revision or verification. The other three- 
fourths of the book, it is to be hoped, is at least 
equally true. 

Considering all the frills of fiction that were 
put into the story to make it readable, the care- 
less inaccuracies that were edited into it, and 
the fact that many person's knew of the pre- 
liminary attempts to buy any old bear and fake 
a capture, it is not strange that people who* al- 
ways know the "inside history" of everything 
that happens, wag their heads wisely and de- 
clare that Monarch was obtained from a bank- 

38 



THE STORY OF MONARCH 

rupt circus, or is an ex-dancer of the streets 
sold to the newspaper by a hard-up Italian. 
But it is incredible that any one who knows a 
bear from a Berkshire hog could for an instant 
mistake Monarch for any variety of tamable 
bear or imagine that any man ever had the 
hardihood to give him dancing lessons. 

When Monarch found himself caught in the 
syndicate trap on Gleason Mountain, he made 
furious efforts to escape. He bit and tore at 
the logs, hurled his great bulk against the sides 
and tried to enlarge every chink that admitted 
light. He required unremitting attention with 
a sharpened stake to prevent him from break- 
ing out. 

For a full week the Grizzly raged and re- 
fused to touch food that was thrown to him. 
Then he became exhausted and the task of se- 
curing him and removing him from the trap 
was begun. The first thing necessary was to 
make a chain fast to one of his fore-legs. That 
job was begun at eight o'clock in the morning 
and finished at six o'clock in the afternoon. 
Much time was wasted in trying to work with 
the chain between two of the side logs. When- 
ever the bear stepped into the loop as it lay 
upon the floor and the chain was drawn tight 

39 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

around his fore-leg just above the foot, he 
pulled it off easily with the other paw, letting 
the men who held the chain fall over backward. 
The feat was finally accomplished by letting 
the looped chain down between the roof logs, 
so that when the bear stepped into it and it 
was drawn sharply upward, it caught him well 
up toward the shoulder. 

Having one leg well anchored, it was com- 
paratively easy to introduce chains and ropes 
between the side logs and secure his other legs. 
He fought furiously during the whole opera- 
tion, and chewed the chains until he splintered 
his canine teeth to the stubs and spattered the 
floor of the trap with bloody froth. It was 
painful to see the plucky brute hurting him- 
self uselessly, but it could not be helped, as he 
would not give up while he could move limb 
or jaw. 

The next operation was gagging the bear so 
that he could not bite. The door of the trap 
was raised and a billet of wood was held where 
he could seize it, which he promptly did. A 
cord made fast to the stick was quickly wound 
around his jaws, with turns around the stick 
on each side, and passed back of his ears and 
around his neck like a bridle. By that means 
40 



THE STORY OF MONARCH 

his jaws were firmly bound to the stick in such 
a manner that he could not move them, while 
his mouth was left open for breathing. 

While one man held the bear's head down 
by pressing with his whole weight upon the 
ends of the gag, another went into the trap 
and put a chain collar around the Grizzly's 
neck, securing it in place with a light chain 
attached to the collar at the back, passing down 
under his armpits and up to' his throat, where 
it was again made fast. The collar passed 
through a ring attached by a swivel to< the end 
of a heavy chain of Norwegian iron. A stout 
rope was fastened around the bear's loins also, 
and to this another strong chain was attached. 
This done, the gag was removed and the Griz- 
zly was ready for his journey down the moun- 
tain. 

In the morning he was hauled out of the 
trap and bound down on a rough skeleton sled 
made from a forked limb, very much like the 
contrivance called by lumbermen a "go-devil." 
Great difficulty was encountered in securing 
a team of horses that Could be induced to haul 
the bear. The first two teams were so terri- 
fied that but little progress could be made, but 
the third team was tractable and the trip down 

41 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

the mountain to the nearest wagon road was 
finished in four days. 

The bear was released from the "go-devil" 
and chained to trees every night; and so long 
as the camp fire burned brightly he would lie 
still and watch it attentively, but when the fire 
burned low he would get up and restlessly 
pace to and fro and tug at the chains, stopping 
now and then to seize in his arms the tree to 
which he was anchored and test its strength by 
shaking it. Every morning the same old fight 
had to be fought before he could be tied to his 
sled. He became very expert in dodging ropes 
and seizing them when the loops fell over his 
legs, and considerable strategic skill was re- 
quired to lasso his paws and stretch him out. 
In the beginning of these contests the Grizzly 
uttered angry growls, but soon became silent 
and fought with dogged persistency, watching 
every movement of his foes with alert attention 
and wasting no energy in aimless struggles. 
He soon learned to keep his hind feet well un- 
der him and his body close to the ground, 
which left only his head and fore-legs to be 
defended from the ropes. So adroit and quick 
was the bear in the use of his paws that a dozen 
men could not get a rope on him while he re- 

42 



THE STORY OF MONARCH 

mained in that posture of defence. But 
when two or three men grasped the chain that 
was around his body and suddenly threw him 
on his back, all four of his legs were in the air 
at once, the riatas flew from all directions and 
he was vanquished. 

Monarch was pretty well worn out when the 
wagon road was reached, and doubtless en- 
joyed the few days of rest and quiet that were 
allowed him while a cage was being built for 
his further transportation. He made the re- 
mainder of the jonrney to San Francisco by 
wagon and railroad, confined in a box con- 
structed of inch-and-a-half Oregon pine that 
had an iron grating at one end. The box was 
not strong enough to have held him for five 
minutes had he attacked it as he attacked the 
trap and as he subsequently demolished an 
iron-lined den, but I put my trust in the moral 
influence of the chain around his neck. The 
Grizzly accepted the situation resignedly and 
behaved admirably during the whole trip. 

Monarch is the largest bear in captivity and 
a thoroughbred Californian Grizzly. No 
naturalist needs a second glance at him to class- 
ify him as Ursus Horribilis. He stands four 
feet high at the shoulder, measures three feet 

43 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

across the chest, 12 inches between the ears 
and 18 inches from ear to nose, and his weight 
is estimated by the best judges at from 1200 
to 1600 pounds. He never has been weighed. 
In disposition he is independent and militant. 
He will fight anything from a crowbar to a 
powder magazine, and permit no man to handle 
him while he can move a muscle. And yet 
when he and I were acquainted — I have not 
seen him since he was taken to Golden Gate 
Park — he was not unreasonably quarrelsome, 
but preserved an attitude of armed neutrality. 
He would accept peace offerings from my 
hand, taking 1 bits of sugar with care not to 
include my fingers, but would tolerate no pet- 
ting. Within certain limits he would acknowl- 
edge an authority which had been made real to 
him by chains and imprisonment, and reluc- 
tantly suspend an intended blow and retreat to 
a corner when insistently commanded, yet the 
fires of rebellion never were extinguished and 
it would have been foolhardy to get within ef- 
fective reach of his paw. To strangers he was 
irreconcilable and unapproachable. 

Monarch passed three or four years in a 
steel cell before he was taken to the Park. He 
devoted a week or so to trying to get out and 

44 



THE STORY OF MONARCH 

testing every bar and joint of his prison, and 
when he realized that his strength was over- 
matched, he broke down and sobbed. That was 
the critical point, and had he not been treated 
tactfully by Louis Ohnimus, doubtless the big 
Grizzly would have died of nervous collapse. 
A live fowl was put before him after he had 
refused food and disdained to notice efforts to 
attract his attention, and the old instinct to kill 
was aroused in him. His dulled eyes gleamed 
green, a swift clutching stroke of the paw se- 
cured the fowl. Monarch bolted the dainty 
morsel, feathers and all, and his interest in life 
was renewed with the revival of his savage 
propensity to slay. 

From that moment he accepted the situation 
and made the best of it. He was provided 
with a bed of shavings, and he soon learned 
the routine of his keeper's work in removing 
the bed. Monarch would not permit the keep- 
er to remove a single shaving from the cage if 
a fresh supply was not in sight. He would 
gather all the bedding in a pile, lie upon it and 
guard every shred jealously, striking and 
smashing any implement of wood or iron thrust 
into the cage to filch his treasure. But when 
a sackful of fresh shavings was placed where 

45 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

he could see it, Monarch voluntarily left his 
bed, went to another part of the cage and 
watched the removal of the pile without inter- 
fering. 

In intelligence and quickness of comprehen- 
sion, the Grizzly was superior to- other animals 
in the zoological garden and compared not un- 
favorably with a bright dog. It could not be 
said of him, as of most other animals, that 
man's mastery of him was due to his failure 
to realize his own power. He knew his 
own strength and how to apply it, and only the 
superior strength of iron and steel kept him 
from doing all the damage of which he was 
capable. 

The lions, for example, were safely kept in 
cages which they could have broken with a 
blow rightly placed. Monarch discovered the 
weak places of such a cage within a few hours 
and wrecked it with swift skill. When in- 
veigled into a movable cage with a falling door, 
he turned the instant the door fell, seized the 
lower edge and tried to raise it. When placed 
in a barred enclosure in the park, he began 
digging under the stone foundation of the 
fence, necessitating the excavation of a deep 
trench and the emplacement therein of large 

46 



THE STORY OF MONARCH 

boulders to prevent his escape. Then he tried 
the aerial route, climbed the twelve foot iron 
palings, bent the tops of inch and a half bars 
and was nearly over when detected and pushed 
back. 

He remains captive only because it is physi- 
cally impossible for him to escape, not because 
he is in the least unaware of his power or 
inept in using it. Apparently he has no illusions, 
concerning man and no respect for him as a 
superior being. He has been beaten by super- 
ior cunning, but never conquered, and he gives 
no parole to refrain from renewing the contest 
when opportunity offers. 

Mr. Ernest Thompson Seton saw Monarch 
and sketched him in 1901, and he said: "I 
consider him the finest Grizzly I have seen in 
captivity." 



Note. — Without doubt the largest captive grizzly bear 
in the world, may be seen in the Golden Gate Park, San 
Francisco. As to his exact weight, there is much con* 
jecture. That has not been determined, as the bear has 
never been placed on a scale. Good judges estimate it 
at not far from twelve hundred pounds. The bear's ap« 
pearance justifies that conclusion. Monarch enjoys the 
enviable distinction of being the largest captive bear in 
the world. — N. Y. Tribune, March 8, 1903. 

47 



CHAPTER III. 

CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT. 

The most famous bear in the world was, is 
and will continue to be the gig-antic Grizzly 
known variously on the Pacific Slope as "Old 
Brin," "Clubfoot/' and "Reelfoot." He was 
first introduced to the public by a mining- 
camp editor named Townsend, who was nick- 
named "Truthful James" in a spirit of playful 
irony. That was in the seventies. Old Brin 
was described as a bear of monstrous size, 
brindled coat, ferocious disposition and evil 
fame among the hunters of the Sierra. He had 
been caught in a steel trap and partly crippled 
by the loss of a toe and other mutilation of a 
front paw, and his clubfooted track was read- 
ily recognizable and served to identify him. 
Old Brin stood at least five feet high at the 
shoulder, weighed a ton or more and found no 
difficulty in carrying away a cow. He seemed 
to be impervious to bullets, and many hunters 
who took his trail never returned. A few who 
met him and had the luck to escape furnished 

48 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

the formidable details of his description and 
spread his fame, with the able assistance of 
Truthful James and other veracious historians 
of the California and Nevada press. 

For several years the clubfooted Grizzly 
ranged the Sierra Nevada from, Lassen county 
to Mono 1 , invulnerable, invincible and myster- 
ious, and every old hunter in the mountains 
had an awesome story to tell of the ferocity 
and uncanny craft of the beast and of his own 
miraculous escape from the jaws of the bear 
after shooting enough lead at him to start a 
smelter. Old Brin was a never-failing recourse 
of the country editor when the foreman was 
insistent for copy, and those who. undertook 
to preserve the fame of his exploits in their 
files scrupulously respected the rights of his 
discoverer and never permitted any vain-glor- 
ious bear hunter to kill him,. As one of the early 
guardians of this incomparable monster, I can 
bear witness that it was the unwritten law of 
the journalistic profession that no serious harm 
should come to the clubfoot bear and he should 
invariably triumph over his enemies. It was 
also understood that a specially interesting 
episode in the career of Old Brin constituted 
a pre-emption claim to guardianship, and, if 
49 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

acknowledged by the preceding guardian, the 
claim could not be jumped so long as it was 
worked with reasonable diligence. 

While Old Brin infested Sierra Valley and. 
vicinity he was my ward, and I regret to say 
that his conduct was tumultuous and sanguin- 
ary in the extreme. I can remember as if it 
were but yesterday how, one afternoon when 
Virginia City was deplorably peaceful and local 
news simply did not exist, Old Brin went on 
a rampage over toward Sierra Valley and 
slaughtered two Italian woodchoppers in the 
most wanton and sensational manner. More 
than ten years later I met in Truckee an old 
settler who remembered the painful occurrence 
well, because the Italians were working for him 
at the time, and he told me the story to prove 
that Old Brin had once roamed that part of 
the mountains. Naturally I was so pleased lo 
learn that my humble effort to keep the local 
columns of the Virginia Chronicle up to the 
high standard of frozen truth had not been in 
vain, that it was with the greatest difficulty I 
dropped a sympathetic tear when the old settler 
of Truckee mourned the sad fate of his Italian 
friends. 

If memory be not at fault, it was the episode 

50 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

of the woodchoppers that precipitated the long- 
cherished design of Virginia City's most noted 
sportsmen to make a combined effort to secure 
the pelt of Old Brin and undying glory. About 
a score of them, heavily armed and provisioned 
for a month, sallied forth from the Comstock 
to find and camp upon the trail of the clubfoot 
bear. They returned without his pelt, but they 
brought back some picturesque and lurid ex- 
planations of their failure and added several 
chapters to the history of Old Brin. 

One of the party was Ned Foster, who never 
stood to lose on any proposition and never wa<s 
known to play any game on the square. Be- 
ing lame, Foster did not have any ambition to 
meet the big bear, but contented himself with 
shooting birds for the pot and helping the 
camp cook. One morning, after all the mighty 
hunters had gone out on their quest, Foster 
picked up his shot-gun, jocularly remarked that 
he guessed he would fetch in a bear, and 
limped away toward a brushy ridge. Present- 
ly the cook heard a shot, followed by yells of 
alarm, and peering from, the tent he saw Fos- 
ter coming down the slope on a gallop, fol- 
lowed by a monstrous bear. The cook seized a 
rifle, tried to load it with shot cartridges, and 
51 



BEARS 1 HAVE MET 

realizing that his agitation made him hope- 
lessly futile, abandoned the attempt to help 
Foster and scrambled up a tree. From his perch 
the cook watched with solicitude the progress 
of Foster and the bear, shouting to Foster ex- 
cited advice to increase his pace and informing 
him of gains made by the pursuer. 

"Run, Ned ! Good Lord, why don't you let 
yourself out?" yelled the frantic cook, as Fos- 
ter lost a length on the turn into the home- 
stretch. "You're not running a lick on God's 
green earth. The bear's gaining on you every 
jump, Ned. Turn yourself loose ! Ned, you've 
just got to run to beat that bear !" 

Ned went by the tree in a hitch-and-kick 
gallop, and as he passed he gasped in scornful 
tones : "You yapping coyote, do you think I'm 
selling this race!" Perhaps he wasn't, but it 
looked that way to the man up the tree. 

That was the end of the tale as it was told 
by the Comstockers, who refused to spoil a 
good climax by gratifying mere idle curiosity 
about the finish of the race. But Foster was 
not eaten up by Old Brin — of course his pur- 
suer was the clubfooted bear — and something 
extraordinary must have happened to save him. 
An indefinite prolongation of the situation is 




Prepared to Pluck Foster 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

unthinkable. Wherefore things happened in 
this wise : Foster's hat fell off, and while the 
bear was investigating it the man gained a few 
yards and time enough to climb a stout sap- 
ling, growing upon the brink of a cleft in the 
country rock about a dozen feet wide and twice 
as deep. The tree was as thick as a man's leg 
at the base and very tall. Foster climbed well 
out of reach of the bear, and, perched in a 
crotch twenty feet above the ground, he felt 
safe. Old Brin sat down at the foot of the tree, 
and with head cocked sidewise thoughtfully 
eyed the man who had affronted him with a 
charge of small shot. Presently he arose and 
with his paws grasped the tree ten or twelve 
feet from the ground, and Foster laughed de- 
risively at the notion of that clumsy beast try- 
ing to climb. But Brin had no notion of climb- 
ing. Holding his grip, he backed away, and 
as the tree bent toward him he took a fresh 
hold higher up, and so, hand over hand, pulled 
the top of it downward and prepared to pluck 
Foster or shake him down like a ripe persim- 
mon. 

A part of Foster's habitual attire under all 
circumstances in warm weather was a long 
linen duster, and it is a defect of ursine percep- 
53 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

tion to confound a man with his clothes. When 
the flapping skirt of Foster's duster seemed to 
be within reach, the over-eager bear made a 
grab for it, and released his grasp of the tree. 
The backward spring of the tough sapling 
nearly dislodged the clinging man, but it also 
gave him an idea, and when the grizzly began 
a repetition of the manoeuvre, he shifted his po- 
sition a little higher and to the other side. 

Old Brin was not appeased by the shred of 
linen he had secured, and again began bending 
the sapling over. This time he had to bend it 
further to get Foster within reach, but the flap- 
ping coat-tail again tempted him too soon, and 
although he secured most of the skirt, he let 
go his hold and the tree sprang back like a 
bended bow. Foster let go his hold too in mid- 
arc and went sailing through the air and across 
the ravine, landing in a thicket with a jar that 
loosened his teeth but broke no bones. He said 
the Grizzly sat bolt upright and looked at the 
tree, the ravine and him for five minutes, then 
cuffed himself soundly on both ears and slunk 
away in evident humiliation and disgust. 
*. * * * 

Nothing but Joe Stewart's flawless reputa- 
tion for veracity could have induced the Com- 

54 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

stock to accept the account of Old Brin's visit 
to camp, which broke up the trip, as it was 
given by the hunters when they returned. Mr. 
Stewart made his living at cards and knew no 
other profession or trade, but his word was as 
good as a secured note at the bank, his views 
on ethical questions were considered superior 
to a bishop's, and all around he was conceded 
to be a better citizen and an honester man than 
Nevada had been able to send to the United 
States Senate. Therefore, as Joe Stewart was 
one of the party and did not deny that events 
happened as described by Col. Orndorff, the 
Comstock never doubted the story of the Blaz- 
ing Bear. 

This section of the expedition had a large 
wall tent and all camp conveniences, including 
lamps and a five-gallon can of kerosene. They 
pitched their tent upon the bank of a stream 
near a deep pool such as trout love in warm 
weather, and they played the national game 
every night. 

Col. Orndorff had opened an opulent jack- 
pot, and Long Brown was thinking about rais- 
ing before the draw when he felt a nudge at 
his elbow as if some one had stumbled against 
him. He was annoyed and he drove his arm 

55 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

backward violently against the canvas, en- 
countering something solid and eliciting a loud 
and angry snort. Long Brown moved just in 
time to escape the sweep of a huge paw, 
armed with claws like sickles, which rent a 
great gap in the back of the tent and revealed 
a gigantic bear still sneezing from the blow 
on the end of his nose and obviously in a nasty 
temper. 

The poker party went out at the front just 
as Old Br in came in at the back, and Long 
Brown thoughtfully took the front pole with 
him., letting the canvas down over the bear and 
impeding pursuit. The lamps were broken in 
the fall, and the oil blazed up under the canvas. 
Col. OrndorrT, Mr. Stewart, Bill Gibson, 
Doughnut Bill and the cook, Noisy Smith, 
climbed trees before taking time to see how 
matters were getting arranged in the tent, and 
Long Brown stopped at the brink of the pool 
and turned around to see if the bear was fol- 
lowing him. 

There was complicated trouble in the tent. 
The bear had tangled himself in the canvas and 
was blindly tossing it about, rolling himself 
up in the slack, and audibly complaining of the 
fire and smoke. The rifles, shot-guns and all 
56 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

but one revolver had been left in the tent, and 
presently they began to pop. Doughnut Bill, 
safe in a sycamore, hitched around to the lee 
side of the trunk and said: "Mr. Brown, I 
seriously advise that you emulate the judicious 
example of the other gentlemen in this game 
and avoid exposing yourself unnecessarily to 
such promiscuous and irresponsible shooting 
as that bear is doing." 

'That's dead straight," added Col. Orndorff. 
"Shin up a tree, Brown, or you'll get 
plunked." 

"Think I'll mix in a little," replied Brown, 
drawing his gun and opening fire upon the 
center of the disturbance. A bursting shot 
\gun answered his first shot, and the charge 
plowed a furrow near Long Brown and threw 
dirt in his face. Then the cartridge boxes be- 
gan exploding as the fire reached them, excit- 
ing the bear to more tumultuous struggles with 
the enfolding canvas and louder roars of pain 
and rage. The five-gallon oil can, probably 
punctured by Long Brown's bullets, furnished 
the climax to the volcanic display by blowing 
up and filling the air with burning canvas, 
blankets and hardware, and out of the fire and 
smoke rushed the blazing bear straight toward 

57 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

Long Brown and the creek. Even Long 
Brown's nerve was not equal to facing a ton 
of Grizzly headed toward him in a whirlwind 
of flame. He turned and dove into the pool. 
That was Old Brin's destination also, and he 
followed Long Brown with a great splash and 
a distinct sizzle. Brown swam under water 
down stream, and the bear went straight across, 
up the opposite bank and into the brush, howl- 
ing blue murder. 

In the morning, when the fire had burned 
out, the sportsmen raked over the ruins and 
recovered the larger part of the jackpot, con- 
sisting of gold and silver coins partly fused and 
much blackened. "Here, gentlemen,' 7 said 
Doughnut Bill, "we have convincing proof of 
the wisdom of our Pacific Coast statesmen and 
financiers in retaining metal as a circulating 
medium during the late lamentable unpleasant- 
ness. Had we succumbed to the vicious habit 
of using paper substitutes for money, we should 
now be weeping over the ashes of a departed 
jackpot. Therefore, I suggest that this is an 
auspicious occasion for passing suitable reso- 
lutions reaffirming Nevada's invincible repug- 
nance to a debased currency, her unalterable 
fidelity to hard money and her distinguished 
approval of the resumption of specie payment." 

58 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

"Get in a whack at the Greenbackers," said 
Col. OrndorfT. 

"I surely approves the suggestion," said Mr. 
Stewart. "As a Jacksonian Democrat, I views 
with alarm the play the Greenbackers make for 
fusion, which the same is a brace game." 

Mr. Gibson also allowed that fusion should 
be coppered by Nevada, and Noisy Smith 
whispered his assent, and the resolutions were 
adopted unanimously. 

The disposition of the jackpot was then con- 
sidered. Col. Orndorff was willing to divide it, 
but he allowed that if the bear had not butted 
into the game he would have raked it down to 
a dead moral certainty. 

"I don't know about that," said Doughnut 
Bill. "The intrusion of our combustible friend 
was unwarrantable and ungentlemanly, not to 
say rude, but as the holder of three aces before 
the draw I claim an interest in the pot. Of 
course I can't show the cards, but that is the 
fact. On your honor as the opener of the pot, 
Colonel, what did you have?" 

"Seven full on eights." 

"That's good," whispered Noisy Smith. "I 
had a four flush." 

Long Brown put his hand into his pocket, 

59 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

drew forth five water-soaked cards, laid them 
down and said : "Had 'em in my hand when 1 
dove." 

Col. Orndorff looked at them and silently 
shoved the melted jackpot over to Long Brown. 
Long Brown's hand was an eight full on 
sevens. 



So long as Old Brin was under the guar- 
dianship of his early friends, it was certain 
that no serious harm would come to him and 
that no hunter would be permitted to boast of 
having conquered him. But a later breed of 
journalistic historians, having no reverence for 
the traditions of the craft and no regard for the 
truth, sprang up, and the slaughter of the club- 
footed Grizzly began. His range was extended 
"from Siskiyou to San Diego, from the Sierra 
to the sea," and he was encountered by mighty 
hunters in every county in California and 
killed in most of them. 

Old Clubfoot's first fatal misadventure was 
in Siskiyou, where he was caught in a trap and 
shot by two intrepid men, w1k> stuffed his skin 
and sent it to San Francisco for exhibition at 

60 




Long Brown Moved Just in Time 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

a fair. He had degenerated to a mangy, yel- 
low beast of about 500 pounds weight, with a 
coat like a wornout doormat, and but for a card 
labelling him as "Old Reelfoot," and exploiting 
the prowess of his slayers, his old friends never 
would have known him. 

Clubfoot's first reincarnation took place in 
Ventura, about 600 miles from the scene of 
his death. He appeared in a sheep camp at 
night, sending the herders up the tallest trees 
in terror, and scattered the flock all over a 
wide-spreading mountain. The herders spent 
the best part of a week in gathering the lost 
sheep, but after the most thorough search of 
which they were capable, some fifty odd were 
still missing. When the superintendent came 
around on his monthly tour of inspection, the 
herders told him the story of the lost sheep, 
and he did not know whether to believe it or 
suspect the herders of illicit traffic in mutton. 

Knowing the mountain well, however, and 
having in mind some places which might easily 
be overlooked by the herders, the superintend- 
ent concluded to make an attempt to clear up 
the mystery for his own satisfaction. For two 
or three days he sought in vain for the trail of 
the missing sheep, visiting several likely places 
61 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

unknown to the herders, and he was about to 
give up the search when his mind pulled out of 
a dusty pigeon-hole of memory a faded picture 
of a queer nook in the mountain, into which he 
had stumbled many years before in chase of a 
wounded deer. More for the sake of seeing if 
he could find the place again than in hope of 
solving the sheep mystery, he renewed his 
search, and at the end of a day's riding over 
the spurs of the mountain and up and down 
ravines, he recognized the slope down which 
he had chased the wounded deer, and saw upon 
it the hoof prints of sheep not quite obliterated 
by wind and rain. 

At the bottom of the slope was a small flat, 
seemingly hemmed in on three sides by steep 
walls. At the upper end, however, behind a 
thick grove of pines, was a break in one of 
the side walls leading to an enclosed cienega, 
an emerald gem set deep in the mountain, as 
though a few acres of ground had sunk bodily 
some fifty feet, forming a pit in which water 
had collected and remained impounded until 
it broke an outlet through the lower wall. 

When the superintendent reached the en- 
trance to this sunken meadow, an opening per- 
haps thirty yards wide, he noticed a well worn 
62 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

path across it from wall to wall, and a glance 
told him that the path had been beaten by a 
bear pacing to and fro. Looking closely at this 
beaten trail, he saw that the footprints were 
large and that one paw of the bear was mal- 
formed. Old Clubfoot without doubt. 

Huddled in silent terror close to the farther 
wall of the little valley were about forty sheep, 
and near the beaten path were the remains of 
ten or a dozen carcases. A little study of the 
situation and the sign told the story to the old 
mountaineer. The frightened band of sheep, 
fleeing blindly before the bear, had been driven 
by chance or by design into this natural trap, 
and the wily old bear had mounted guard at the 
entrance and paced his beat until the sheep 
were thoroughly cured of any tendency to 
wander down toward the lower end of the mea- 
dow. When he wanted mutton, he caught a 
fat sheep, carried it to his sentry beat and 
killed and ate it there, leaving the remains as a 
warning to the rest not to cross the dead line. 
The grass in the cienega was thick and green, 
and there was enough seepage of water to fur- 
nish drink for the flock. So the provident bear 
had several months' supply of mutton on the 
hoof, penned up and growing fat in his private 
63 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

storehouse, and his trail across the entrance 
was as good as a five-barred gate. 

A man less wise than the superintendent 
would have undertaken to drive the sheep out 
and back to camp, but the superintendent 
knew the ways of sheep and foresaw that an 
attempt to rescue them without the aid of dogs 
and herders would result only in an endless 
surging to and fro in the basin. Besides it was 
almost dusk, the bear might come home to sup- 
per at any moment and a revolver was of little 
use in a bear fight in the dark. Moreover the 
looting of Old Clubfoot's larder would only 
ensure more midnight raids on the flocks upon 
the mountain. Therefore the superintendent 
rode away. 

The next day he returned with an old muz- 
zle-loading Belgian musket of about 75 calibre, 
a piece of fresh pork and some twine, and he 
busied himself awhile among some trees near 
the bear's sentry beat. When he left, the old 
musket was tied firmly to the tree in such a 
position that the muzzle could be reached only 
from in front and in line with the barrel. In 
the breech of the barrel were ten drams of 
quick rifle powder, and upon the powder rested 
a brass 12-gauge shot shell, which had been 
64 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

filled with molten lead. Upon the muzzle was 
tied the fresh pork, attached to a string tied 
to the trigger and passing through a screw eye 
back of the guard. The superintendent knew 
that pork would be tempting to a mutton-sated 
bear, and he chuckled as he rode away. 

At midnight in the camp upon the mountain 
the superintendent heard a muffled roar echoing 
far away, and he laughed softly, turned over 
and went to sleep. In the morning, with two 
herders and their collies, he went back to the 
cienega. There was not much left of the mus- 
ket, but in front of where it had been was a 
pool of blood, and a crimson-splashed trail led 
away from that spot across the flat and down 
a brushy gulch. 

Cautiously, rifle in hand, the superintendent 
followed the blood sign, urging the unwilling 
dogs ahead and leading the more unwilling 
Basque shepherds, who had no stomach for 
meetings with a wounded grizzly in the brush. 
Half a mile from the cienega the dogs stopped 
before a thicket, bristled their backs and 
growled impatient remonstrance to the super- 
intendent's efforts to shove them into the brush 
with his foot. In response to urgent encourage- 
ment, the collies, bracing back, barked furious- 

65 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

ly at the thicket, while the herders edged away 
to climbable trees, and the superintendent 
waited with tense nerves for the rush of a 
wounded bear. 

But nothing- stirred in the thicket, no growl 
answered the dogs. Five minutes, perhaps — it 
seemed like half an hour — the superintendent 
stood there with rifle ready and cold drops 
beading his forehead. Then he backed away, 
picked up a stone, and heaved it into the brush. 
Another and still others he threw until he had 
thoroughly "shelled the woods" without elicit- 
ing a sound or a movement. The silence gave 
the dogs courage and slowly they pushed into 
the thicket with many haltings and backward 
starts, and presently their barking changed in 
tone and told the man that they had found 
something of which they were not afraid. 
Then the superintendent pushed his way 
through the bushes and found the bear dead. 
The big slug from the musket had entered his 
throat and traversed him from stem, to stern, 
and spouting his life blood in quarts he had 
gone half a mile before his amazing vitality 
ebbed clean away and left him a huge heap of 
carrion. 

It is the tradition of the mountain that the 
66 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

ursine shepherd was none other than Old Club- 
foot, and it is not worth while to dispute with 
the faith of a man who follows sheep in the 
solitudes. 



Like Phra the Phoenician, Old Clubfoot 
could not stay dead, and when there was trou- 
ble afoot in the world, with tumult and fight- 
ing, no grave was deep enough, no tomb mas- 
sive enough to hold him. His next recrudes- 
cence was in Old Tuolumne, where he forgot 
former experiences with steel traps and set his 
foot into the jaws of one placed in his way by 
vindictive cattlemen. Attached to the chain 
of the trap was a heavy pine chunk, and Old 
Clubfoot dragged the clog for many miles, 
leaving through the brush a trail easily fol- 
lowed, and lay down to rest in a thicket grow- 
ing among a huddle of rocks. 

Hot upon the trail came two hunters, Wes- 
ley Wood and a Sclavonian whose name was 
something like Sakarovitch, and had been sim* 
plified to Joe Screech. Wood was certain that 
the bear had stopped in the thicket, which was 
almost on the verge of one of the walls of 
Hetch-Hetchy Valley, a replica of Yosemite 
67 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

on half scale, and he was too old a hand at th^ 
game to follow the trail in. One experience 
with a bear in the brush is enough to teach the 
greatest fool in the world, if he survives, that 
wild animals do not lie down to rest without 
taking precautions against surprise by possible 
pursuers. They do not stop short in their 
tracks and go to sleep where any chance comer 
may walk over them, but make a half circle 
loop or letter U in the trail and lie where they 
can watch the route by which they came. 

Joe Screech had not learned this, and he 
jeered at Wood for halting at the thicket. 
Wood admitted that he was afraid to* follow 
the trail another foot and tried to hold Joe 
back, but Joe had killed black bears and knew 
nothing of Grizzlies, and he had a contempt- 
uous opinion of the courage of bears and a 
correspondingly exalted belief in his own. At 
least he was afraid somebody might suspect 
him of being afraid, and he confounded cau- 
tion with cowardice in others. 

So Joe Screech laughed offensively at Wood 
as he strode into the thicket. "If you're afraid," 
he said, "you stay there and I'll run the bear 
out. Maybe you'd better climb a tree." 

"That's just what we both would do if we 
68 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

had any sense. Joe Screech, you are the 
damnedest fool in Tuolumne. That bear'll 
teach you something if he don't kill you." 

"Oh, climb a tree and watch my smoke," 
and Joe passed out of sight. 

Presently Joe's head appeared again as he 
climbed upon a boulder close to the edge of the 
cliff and peered around him. A sudden rat- 
tling of iron upon stone, a deep growl and a 
casta.net clashing of teeth, and the Grizzly 
arose behind Joe Screech, towering far above 
him and swinging the trap from his paw. Joe 
Screech had time for but one glance of terror, 
and as he jumped the bear swung trap, chain 
and clog in the air and reached for him with 
a mighty blow. It was the fifty-pound steel 
trap that landed upon Joe's head and sent him 
plunging over the cliff just as Wood's Win- 
chester began to bark. As fast as the lever 
could be worked the bullets thudded into the 
Grizzly's back even while Joe was pitching for- 
ward. 

Old Clubfoot had ignored the trap and the 
clog in his eagerness to reach the man with 
his nearest paw, and the impetus of the stroke, 
aided by the momentum of the circling clog, 
threw him from his balance. Probably a bul- 
69 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

let in the back of the head had it's effect also, 
for the huge bulk of the bear toppled forward 
and followed Joe Screech over the cliff. 

Wood scrambled desperately through the 
thicket to the cliff and looked down into 
Hetch-Hetehey. A thousand feet below, where 
the talus began to slope from the sheer cliff, 
dust was still floating, and stones were sliding 
down a fresh scar in the loose soil of the steep 
incline toward the forest at the foot. 



In his old age, the big brindled bear grew 
weary of being killed and resurrected and 
longed for a quiet life. Little, ordinary, no- 
account bears had personated him and got 
themselves killed under false pretenses from 
one end of the Sierra to the other, and some 
of them had been impudent enough to carry 
their imposture to the extent of placing step- 
ladders against his sign-board trees and re- 
cording their alleged height a yard or two 
above his mark. That made him tired. More- 
over the gout in his bad foot troubled him 
more and more, and he ceased to get much 
satisfaction from rolling around on a "flat 
wheel" and scaring people with his tracks. 

70 




The Bear Swung Trap, Chain and Clog' 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

Wherefore Clubfoot deserted his old haunts 
and went down into a green valley, inhabited 
by bee-keepers and other peaceable folk, where 
he lived on locusts and honey and forgot the 
strenuous life. 

All went well with the retired terror of the 
mountains for a long time. The only fly in 
the ointment of his content was Jerky John- 
son, who kept dogs and went pirooting around 
the hills with a gun, making much noise and 
scaring the wits out of coyotes and jack rab- 
bits. Old Clubfoot realized that his eyes were 
dimming and his hearing becoming impaired, 
and it annoyed him to be always on the alert, 
lest he should come across Jerky in the brush 
and step on him, inadvertently. 

Jerky's ostensible occupation, from which 
his front name was derived, was killing deer 
and selling jerked venison, but if the greater 
part of his stock was not plain jerked beef, 
the cattle-men in that section were victims of 
strange hallucinations and harborers of ne- 
farious suspicions. Although Clubfoot was 
credited with large numbers of dead steers 
found on the ranges, he was conscious of his 
own innocence, due to some extent to the loss 
of most of his teeth, and he had better reason 
71 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

than the cow-men had for putting it up to 
Jerky. 

These particulars concerning Mr. Johnson's 
vocation enable the reader to appreciate the 
emotions aroused in the breast of Old Clubfoot 
when he found a newspaper blowing about a 
bee ranch and saw a thrilling account of his own 
death at the hands of the redoubtable Jerky 
Johnson. He had just tipped over a hive and 
was about to fill up with luscious white sage 
honey when that deplorably sensational news- 
paper fluttered under his eye and the scandal- 
ous fabrication of Jerky stared him in the face. 
"This is the limit," he moaned, and his great 
heart broke. 

Slowly and painfully the poor old bear stag- 
gered down the valley. His eyes were glazed 
and he could not tell where the trees and barb- 
wire fences were until he butted his nose 
against them. The gout in his maimed foot 
throbbed horribly, and all the loose bullets in 
his system seemed to have assembled in his 
chest and taken the place of his once stout 
heart. But he had a fixed purpose in his mind, 
and on he went to its fulfillment, grimly deter- 
mined to make a fitting finish to a romantic 
life. 

72 



CHRONICLES OF CLUBFOOT 

At the lower end of the valley lived the 
country doctor. To his house came the club- 
footed bear at midnight, worn and nearly spent 
with the pitiful journey. There was a dim light 
in the back office, but it was unoccupied. Club- 
foot heaved his bulk against the door and 
broke the lock, softly entered the room and 
sniffed anxiously of the rows of jars and bot- 
tles upon a shelf. His eyes were dim and he 
could not read the labels, but his nose was still 
keen and he knew he should find what he was 
seeking. He found it. Taking down a two- 
gallon jar, Clubfoot tucked it under his arm 
tenderly and walked out erect, just as in the old 
days he was wont to walk away from a farm- 
yard with a calf or a pig under each arm. It 
has been said of him that he could carry off 
a steer in that fashion, but probably that is an 
exaggeration or even a fable. 

Behind the doctor's stable was a bucket con- 
taining the sponge used in washing the doc- 
tor's carriage. Clubfoot found the bucket, 
broke the two-gallon jar upon the sharp edge 
and spilled the contents upon the sponge. Tak- 
ing one last look at the stars and the distant 
mountain peaks, he plunged his muzzle into 
the sponge, jammed his head tightly into' the 
bucket and took one long, deep breath. 
73 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

In the morning "Doc." Chismore found a 
gigantic dead bear behind the barn, with the 
stable bucket firmly fixed upon his head and 
covering his nose and mouth. Scattered about 
were the fragments of a chloroform jar, and 
between the claws of the bear's maimed foot 
was a crumpled Sunday supplement of a yel- 
low journal, containing an account of the slay- 
ing of Old Brin, the Club-footed Grizzly, by 
Jerky Johnson. Being a past master of wood- 
craft, Doctor Chismore read the signs like a 
printed page, and applying the method of Zadig 
he reconstructed the whole story of the dolor- 
ous passing of the greatest bear in the world. 



74 



CHAPTER IV. 



MOUNTAIN CHARLEY. 



Charles McKiernan was a well-known lum- 
ber merchant of San Jose, Cal. To old timers 
he was "Mountain Charlie," having spent most 
of his life in the Santa Cruz mountains, where 
he owned timber land and saw mills. Mc- 
Kiernan's face was strangely disfigured. His 
left eye was missing and his forehead was so 
badly scarred that he wore his hair in a bang 
falling to his eyebrows to conceal the marks. 
From his own lips I heard the story of those 
scars. 

This was also in the days of the muzzle- 
loading rifle. McKiernan and a partner were 
holding down timber claims in the mountains 
and living in a cabin overlooking a wide can- 
yon. One morning they saw a Grizzly turning 
over rocks at the foot of a spur jutting from 
the main ridge into the canyon, and taking their 
rifles they followed the ridge around to the 
spur to get a shot at him from that point. It 
so happened that the bear also fancied that he 

75 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

had business on the top of the spur, and began 
climbing soon after the men lost sight of him. 

The bear and the men met unexpectedly at 
the top, and the bear halted hesitatingly with 
his head and breast just showing above the 
rocks at the brink of the steep slope. Mc- 
Kiernan did not want to begin the fight at such 
close quarters, and he was confident that the 
bear would back down and attempt to return 
to the brush at the foot of the spur if given 
time. Then he would have the advantage of 
the up-hill position and plenty of time to re- 
load if the bear should attempt to return after 
the first shot. 

But McKiernan's partner lost his nerve, 
turned tail and ran away, and that encouraged 
the bear to take the offensive, just as it would 
invite attack from a hesitating dog. The 
Grizzly sprang up over the edge of the steep 
and charged McKiernan, who threw up his 
rifle and fired at the bear's chest. It was a 
Yeager rifle carrying an ounce ball, and it 
checked the charge for a moment by bringing 
the bear to his knees. As the bear gathered 
himself for another rush, McKiernan swung 
the heavy rifle and struck the bear over the 
head with the barrel. He was a powerful man, 
76 



MOUNTAIN CHARLEY 

accustomed to swinging- an axe, and the blow 
knocked the bear down and stunned him. The 
stock of the rifle broke in McKiernan's hands 
and the barrel fell close by the bear, which had 
fallen upon the very edge of a steep slope at 
the side of the spur or knob. 

McKiernan stooped to recover the rifle bar- 
rel with which to beat the bear to death, and 
in doing so his head came close to the bear's. 
The Grizzly had partly recovered, and throw- 
ing his head upward he closed his jaws upon 
McKiernan's forehead with a snap like a steel 
trap. One lower tusk entered the left eye 
socket, and an upper canine tooth sunk into 
the skull. McKiernan fell face downward, his 
arms under his face, and the bear slid over the 
edge and rolled down the almost vertical wall 
into the canyon, having dislodged himself by 
the effort to seize the man. 

McKiernan did not lose consciousness, but 
he was unable to move. He knew his left eye 
was gone, and he feared that he was bleeding 
to death. He heard the bear rolling down the 
slope, heard the crash of bushes as he struck 
the bottom, and knew because of his bawling 
that the Grizzly was mortally hurt. Then he 
wondered why his partner did not come to 

77 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

him, and sense of pain and fear of death were 
submerged under a wave of indignation at the 
man's cowardice and flight. Presently he 
heard faintly a voice calling him across the 
canyon, but could not distinguish the words, 
and after a time he realized that his partner 
had fled back to the cabin and was shouting to 
him. He could not answer, nor could he raise 
his head, but he managed to free one arm and 
wave it feebly. The partner finally saw the 
movement and plucked up enough courage to 
come back, and with his help McKiernan some- 
how got to the cabin. 

A young doctor from San Jose attempted to 
patch up the broken skull after removing a 
large piece and leaving the envelope of the 
brain exposed. He had read something about 
trephining and inserting silver plates, and he 
hammered out a silver dollar and set it like a 
piece of mosaic into McKiernan's forehead, 
where it resisted the efforts of nature to repair 
damages and caused McKiernan a thousand 
times more agony than he had suffered from 
the Grizzly's tusks. Only the marvelous vital- 
ity of the man saved him from the conse- 
quences of such surgery. For days and weeks 
he sat in his cabin dripping his life away out 
78 



MOUNTAIN CHARLEY 

of a wound that closed, swelled with fierce pain 
and broke out afresh, and the drain upon his 
system gave him an incredible appetite for 
meat, which he devoured in Gargantuan quan- 
tities. 

Then old Doctor Spencer went up to 
"Mountain Charlie's" cabin, took out the sil- 
ver dollar, removed a wad of eyebrow that had 
been pushed into the hole made by the bear's 
lower tooth in the eye socket, and McKiernan 
recovered. 

And the first thing he did when he was able 
to travel was to load up a shotgun and hunt 
San Jose from one end to the other for the 
man who had set a silver dollar in his skull. 



79 



CHAPTER V. 

IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 

Over-confidence and some contempt for 
bears, born of easy victories cheaply won, led 
one noted Californian hunter into The Valley 
of the Shadow, from which he emerged con- 
tent to let his fame rest wholly upon his past 
record and without ardor for further distinc- 
tion as a slayer of Grizzlies. As mementoes 
of a fight that has become a classic in the ur- 
sine annals of California, John W. Searles, the 
borax miner of San Bernardino, kept for many 
years in his office a two-ounce bottle filled with 
bits of bone and teeth from his own jaw, and 
a Spencer rifle dented in stock and barrel by 
the teeth of a Grizzly. 

On a hunting trip in Kern county, Mr. 
Searles had a remarkable run of luck and piled 
three bears in a heap without moving out of 
his tracks or getting the least sign of fight. It 
was so easy that he insisted upon going right 
through the Tehachepi range and killing all 
the Grizzlies infesting the mountains. He and 
80 



IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW 

his party made camp in March, 1870, not far 
from the headquarters of General Beale's 
Liebra ranch in the northern part of Los An- 
geles county. Romulo Pico was then in 
charge at the Liebra, and nearly thirty years 
later, while hunting a notorious bear on the 
scene of Searles's adventure, he told me the 
story of the fight. 

Searles was armed with a Spencer repeater 
but had shot away the ammunition adapted to 
the rifle and had been able to procure only 
some cartridges which fitted the chamber so 
badly that two blows of the hammer were gen- 
erally required to explode one of them. Not- 
withstanding this serious defect of his weapon, 
Searles had so poor an opinion of the Grizzly 
that he went out alone after the bear several 
miles from camp. There was some snow on 
the ground and on the brush, and finding bear 
tracks, Searles tied his horse and took the trail 
afoot. He found a bear lying asleep under 
the brush and killed it, and while he was stand- 
ing over the body he heard another bear break- 
ing brush in a thicket not far away. 

Leaving the dead bear, he took up the trail 
of its mate and followed until his clothing was 
soaked with melting snow and the daylight 

81 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

was almost gone. The bear halted in a dense 
thicket and Searles began working his way 
through the chaparral to stir him up. Of 
course the bear was not where his tracks seem- 
ed to indicate him, to be, and the meeting was 
sudden and unexpected. The bear rose within 
two feet of the hunter and almost behind him. 
There was neither time nor room to put rifle to 
shoulder, and Searles swung it around, point- 
ed it by guess and fired. The ball did little 
damage, but the powder flash partly blinded 
the bear and it came down to all-fours and be- 
gan pawing at its eyes, giving Searles an op- 
portunity to throw in another cartridge and 
take fair aim at the head. 

If Searles had not forgotten in his excite- 
ment the defect of his weapon, the bear fight 
would have been ended right there. He pulled 
trigger with deadly aim, but the rifle missed 
fire. Instead of re-cocking the piece and try- 
ing a second snap, he worked the lever, threw 
in a new cartridge and pulled the trigger. 
Again no explosion. Again he failed to re- 
member the trick of the rifle, and tried a third* 
cartridge, which also missed fire. 

Then the bear became interested in the affair 
and turned upon the hunter at close quarters. 

82 



IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW 

Seizing the barrel of the rifle in his jaws, the 
Grizzly wrenched it from Searles's grasp, threw 
it aside and hurled himself bodily upon his foe. 
Searles went down beneath the bear. Placing 
one paw upon his breast the bear crunched the 
hunter's lower jaw between his teeth, tore a 
mouthful of flesh from his throat and took a 
third bite out of his shoulder. Then he rolled 
the man over, bit into his back and went away. 
The cold Californian night saved the man's 
life by freezing the blood that flowed from his 
wounds and sealing up the torn veins. He 
was a robust, hardy man, and he pulled him- 
self together and refused to die out there in 
the brush. With his jaw hanging by shreds, 
his wind-pipe severed and his left arm dang- 
ling useless, he crawled to his horse, got into 
the saddle and rode to camp, whence his com- 
panions took him to the Liebra ranch house. 
Romulo Pico was sure Searles would die be- 
fore morning, but he dressed the wounds with 
the simple skill of the mountaineer who learns 
some things not taught in books, and tried to 
make death as little painful as possible. Find- 
ing Searles not only alive in the morning but 
obstinately determined not to submit to the in- 
dignity of being killed by a bear, Pico hitched 
83 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

up a team to a ranch wagon and sent him to 
Los Angeles, a two-days' journey, where the 
surgeons consulted over him and proposed all 
sorts of interesting operations by way of ex- 
periment upon a man who was sure to die 
anyway. 

Searles was unable to tell the surgeons what 
he thought of their schemes for wiring him 
together, but he indicated his dissent by kick- 
ing one of them in the stomach. Then they 
called in a dentist as an expert on broken jaws, 
after they had attended to the other damages, 
and the dentist showed them how to remove 
the debris and where to patch and sew, and 
they managed to get the shattered piece of hu- 
man machinery tinkered up in fairly good 
shape. The vitality and obstinacy of Searles 
did the rest, and in a few weeks he was on his 
feet again and planning prospecting trips to 
Death Valley, not The Valley of the Shadow 
through which he had passed, but the grewsome 
desert of Southern California where he found 
his fortune in borax. 



84 



CHAPTER VI. 

WHEN GRIZZLIES RAN IN DROVES. 

William Thurman, who owned a lumber 
mill on the Chowchilla mountain, not far from 
the Mariposa grove of Big Trees, told this 
plain, unadorned tale of an old-fashioned 
Grizzly bear hunt. 

He was moved thereto by inspection of a 
Winchester express rifle, carrying a half-inch 
ball, backed by no grains of powder, that was 
shown to him by a hunter. 

"If we had been armed with such rifles in 
early days," said Mr. Thurman, "the Grizzly 
wouldn't have achieved his reputation for vi- 
tality and staying powers in a fight. There is 
no doubt that he is a very tough animal and a 
game fighter, but in the days when he made a 
terrible name for himself he had to face no 
such weapons as that. 

"I assisted in killing, in 1850, the first Griz- 
zlies that were brought into the town of Son- 
ora. I had heard a great deal about the Griz- 
zly, and coming across the plains I talked to 

85 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

my comrade, Green, about what I should do if 
I should get a chance at a bear. I was a pretty 
good shot, and thought it would be no trick 
at all to kill a bear with the Mississippi rifle 
that I brought home from the Mexican war. 

"One day I went out with a man named 
Willis, who was a good hunter, and in the hills 
back of Sonora we found plenty of bear sign. 
In fact we could get through the thick brush 
and chaparral only on the trails made by 
bears, and we had to go carefully for fear of 
running upon a Grizzly at close quarters. Al- 
though it was evident that we were in a bear 
country, we hadn't seen anything to shoot 
at when we emerged from the brush into an 
open space about fifty yards in diameter. 

"Willis said that he was sure bears were 
close around us, if we could only see them, 
and I proposed to climb a tree on the other 
side of the clearing and get a good view of the 
surrounding thickets. If I should see bears I 
was to make a noise and try to scare them out 
of their hiding places. 

"I started across the opening, but before I 
reached the tree I saw a huge Grizzly coming 
toward me through the brush. He looked 
much larger and uglier than I had expected, 

86 



WHEN GRIZZLIES RAN IN DROVES 

and it struck me that the proper thing for me 
was to get into that tree before shooting. I 
got to the tree all right enough, but found that 
I couldn't climb it and take my rifle up with 
me. Willis saw my difficulty and shouted to 
me that I couldn't make it, and so I abandoned 
the attempt and ran back toward him. 

"The bearj was following me, and Willis 
started back into the brush. I called to him 
not to do that, but to stand in the open and 
wait for me. He halted, and when I got along- 
side we both turned and raised our rifles 
When the bear saw that we were standing our 
ground, he stopped, looked at us a moment and 
then turned and shuffled back into the brush. 
He was so big and looked so formidable that 
we concluded to let him go unmolested, rather 
relieved, in fact, that we were let out of the 
scrape so easily. 

"We made our way back to camp with some 
caution and decided that we would get up a 
crowd and go bear hunting the next day. 
When we told our adventure, Green was very 
hilarious at my expense and kept reminding 
me of the brave things I had said coming 
across the plains. He was so everlastingly 
tickled with his joke that he sat up all that 

87 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

night to guy me about my running away from 
a bear. I told him I would show him all the 
bears he wanted to see the next day, and give 
him a chance to try his own nerves. 

"The next day five of us went out to look 
for bears, and we struck them thick before we 
got to the place where we had found so much 
sign. Willis and I took the upper side of a 
patch of brush, and Green and the other two 
skirted the lower edge. An old Grizzly and 
two cubs, startled by some noise made by the 
other fellows, jumped out of the brush on our 
side, and we fired at them. My bullet struck 
one near the shoulder, and Willis hit the dam 
in the belly. They all turned and ran down 
through the brush toward the rest of the 
crowd, and got out of our range. 

"The noise made by them in running 
through the brush stirred up another squad, 
and when the shooting began down below five 
bears came tearing out on our side to get out 
of the way. Willis raised his rifle and pulled 
the trigger, but luckily the cap failed to ex- 
plode. The five turned as soon as they saw us 
and ran in another direction. I was going to 
shoot one in the rump, but Willis stopped me, 
saying that we had our hands full without 



WHEN GRIZZLIES RAN IN DROVES 

inviting any more bears to join the scrimmage. 
Before those five bears got out of sight three 
more broke cover and joined them, and for a 
moment there were eleven Grizzly bears, young 
and old, in sight from where I stood. Eight 
of them ran away and the original three kept 
us all busy for the best part of the afternoon. 

"For some time the other three men had all 
the fun, while Willis and I stood guard on our 
side of the thicket and watched the perform- 
ance. The old bear would stand up and look 
over a patch of brush to locate her enemy, and 
somebody would give her a shot. She would 
drop to all fours and gallop around to where 
she saw the man last, and he would run 
around the other side and reload. The cubs 
were half grown — big enough to be dangerous 
— and the boys had to watch for them while 
dodging about. 

"I got even on Green that afternoon. He 
had forgotten to bring any caps, and after his 
first shot he could do nothing but dodge 
around the brush and keep out of the way. 
One of the bears was after him, and he had to 
step lively. While he was waiting to see which 
way the bear was coming next, he made mo- 
tions with his hand, pointing to the nipple of 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

his rifle, to indicate that he wanted caps. I 
saw what he meant, but instead of going to 
him to supply him with caps I stood still and 
laughed at him and applauded his running 
when the bear chased -him. That made him 
furious and he yelled that if he had a cap he'd 
take a shot at me. 

"After two or three hours of dodging about, 
every man taking a shot whenever he got a 
chance, one of the cubs keeled over and the 
dam and the other cub retreated into the thick- 
est part of the brush patch. 

"We consulted and decided that if we killed 
the other cub next the dam might quit and 
get away, whereas if we killed the dam the 
cub probably wouldn't leave her and we'd bag 
the whole outfit. One of the party crawled cau- 
tiously into the thicket and presently he fired. 
Then he called to me to come in, and when I 
crawled up to him he said : T've killed the cub 
by mistake, but the old one is lying badly 
wounded on the other side of a little open spot, 
and you can get a splendid shot at the butt of 
her ear while I back out and reload.' 

"He backed out, and I crawled up and took 
his place. There was the old bear about ten 
yards away, lying down and bleeding from 

90 



WHEN GRIZZLIES RAN IN DROVES 

a great many wounds. She seemed to be 
nearly exhausted and out of breath. I was in 
the act of raising my rifle to take aim. at her 
head, when she caught sight of me and sud- 
denly sprang up and rushed at me. She was 
almost upon me in two jumps, and I thought I 
was in for a bad time of it. I had no time to 
aim, but pushed out my rifle instinctively and 
fired in her face. The bullet struck her in the 
mouth, and the pain caused her to stop, wheel 
around and make a rush through the chaparral 
in the opposite direction. Such a shot as that 
from a Winchester express would have blown 
off the whole roof of her head, but my bullet, 
as I found later, tore through her tongue, split- 
ting the root, and stopped when it struck bone. 

"When she broke out of the brush on the 
other side three of the boys fired intoi her and 
she fell dead. We looked her over and found 
more than thirty bullets in her. We had been 
shooting at her' and dodging her in the brush 
from ii o'clock in the forenoon until after 3 
o'clock, and she had caved in from sheer ex- 
haustion and loss of blood, not from the ef- 
fects of any single bullet. 

"We packed the three carcases into Sonora 
that night and a butcher named Dodge offered 

91 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

to cut them up and sell the meat without 
charge to us if we would let him have the 
bears at his shop. That was the first bear 
meat ever taken into Sonora, and everybody in 
the camp wanted a piece. In the morning there 
was a line of men at Dodge's shop like the 
crowd waiting at a theatre for Patti tickets. 
Men far down the line shouted to Dodge not to 
sell the meat in big pieces, but to save slices 
for them. The meat sold for $i a pound. 
Everybody got a slice, and we got $500 for 
our three bears. 

"One of our crowd was so elated over the 
profits of bear-hunting that he started out 
alone the next day to get more Grizzly meat. 
He didn't come back, and the boys who went 
out to look for him found his body, covered 
up with leaves and dirt, in the edge of a 
clump of brush. His skull had been smashed 
by a blow from a Grizzly's paw." 



n 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE ADVENTURES OF PIKE. 

Pike was one of the oldest of Yosemite 
guides and altogether the quaintest of the 
many queer old fellows who drifted into the 
valley in early days and there were stranded 
for life. He had another name, no doubt, but 
nobody knew or cared what it might be, and 
he seemed to have forgotten it himself. "Pike" 
fitted him, served all the purposes for which 
names were invented, was easy to pronounce, 
and therefore was all the name he needed. 
Pike was tall, round-shouldered, lop-sided, 
slouchy, good-natured, illiterate, garrulous, 
frankly vain of the little scraps of botanical 
nomenclature he had picked up and as lazy and 
unacquainted with soap as an Indian. 

Pike dearly loved bears and bear stories. 
When there were no tourists about to whom 
he could tell bear stories, he would go into the 
woods and have adventures with bears and 
stock up with stories for the next season. 
Pike never had to kill a bear to get a story out 
93 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

of him. He brought in no bear skins, pointed 
out no bullet holes, exhibited no scars and told 
no blood-curdling tales of furious combat and 
hair-breadth escapes. Pike and the bears ap- 
peared to have an understanding that there 
was room enough in the woods for both and 
that his, hunting was all in the way of innocent 
amusement and recreation, to be spiced now 
and then with a practical joke. 

"Black bears and brown bears are peaceable 
folks," Pike used to say in his Californianized- 
Missourian vernacular. "There's nothing 
mean about 'em and they don't go around 
with chips on their shoulders. I generally get 
along with them slick as grease and they never 
try to jump me when I haven't got a gun. 
Why, sir, I can just talk a brown bear out of 
the trail, even when he thinks he owns it. I 
did one night in the valley. I was going from 
Barnard's up to the Stoneman when I ran right 
up against a big brown bear in the dark. He 
was coming down the road and was in pretty 
considerable of a hurry, too — going down to 
the butcher's corral for supper I reckon 1 — and 
we stopped about three feet apart. 'What you 
adoin' of here,' says I. 'Seems to me you're 
prowling around mighty permiscuous, buntin' 
94 



THE ADVENTURES OF PIKE 

inter people on the State stage road. You git 
inter the bresh,' says I, 'where you belong or 
I'll kick a few dents into you. Now don't 
stand here argifying the pint/ says I, just as 
important as if I was the Gardeen of the Val- 
ley, which I wasn't. 'Scoot, skedaddle, vamoos 
the ranch, git off the earth,' I says, 'if you ain't 
aimin' to git your head punched.' 

"Well, sir, he stood there a 'minute with his 
head cocked sidewise, kinder grunted once as 
if he was saying 'good-night,' and turned off 
the road into the brush and went about his 
business, and I poked along up to the Stone- 
man. 'Course I can't swear that he knew just 
what I said, but he ketched the general drift 
of the argyment all right, what you might call 
the prepoort of my remarks, and he knowed 
he hadn't nd *case worth fighting about. 

"I remember once when Jim Duncan and me 
was ketched out in a snowstorm up near the 
head of Alder Creek, and lost each other in 
the dark. I knew Jim would take care of him- 
self and it was no use tramping around, so I 
hunted a hole to sleep in. I found a place un- 
der a rock just big enough for me, where the 
snow didn't blow in, and I curled up on some 
dry leaves and snoozed off in no time. By and 
95 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

by something touched my face and I woke up, 
and there was a bear poking his head in and 
wondering if there was room for two. There 
wasn't no room and I don't like to sleep with 
bears nohow. Bears are all right in their 
place and I don't hold to no prejudices, but 
I'm notional about some things and I never 
could stand bears in my bed ; they smell worse 
than Indians. So I says to that bear, which 
was looking mighty wishful into my snug 
quarters, 'Git along out of this; I was here 
first,' and I reached up and fetched him a back- 
handed slap on the nose. You'd orter heard 
him sneeze as he moseyed off. Last thing I 
remembered when I turned over and went to 
sleep was him a sneezing as he wandered 
around looking for another hole. 

"If that had been a she-bear, of course I'd 
have crawled out and gave her my place like 
a gentleman. You never know what a she- 
bear, or any other kind of she, is going to do 
next, and the best way to get along with 'em 
is to let 'em have their own way and be polite. 
I'm always polite to ladies — or most always 
any way. Of course when they get too can- 
tankerous a man has to forget his manners and 
call 'em down. 

96 



THE ADVENTURES OF PIKE 

"I was impolite to a she-bear once, but she 
got back at me. I was, over on the far side of 
Signal Peak hunting gray squirrels with a 
shot-gun. I heard a funny sort of squealing 
a little way off, and set out to find out what 
was going on in the woods. Poking quietly 
through the brush, I came to the top of a 
ledge that dropped off straight and smooth to 
a flat covered with bear clover, just an open- 
ing in the forest. A she-bear was busy crack- 
ing open sugar pine cones and showing two 
cubs how to get the nuts out of them. The 
little fellows were having a gay old time, 
wrestling, boxing, stealing nuts from mamma 
and rolling about in the clover like a couple 
of kids, and I laid down in some bushes on 
top of the ledge and watched them. Some- 
times they would grab a cone from the old one 
or bite her ear, and she would scold them and 
cuff them until they yelped that they'd be good. 
They couldn't be good half a minute, and they 
had the old lady's patience most worn out be- 
fore I took a hand in the frolic. 

"The old bear's coat was pretty thin and 
rusty, and she'd been sitting down or coast- 
ing down a bear slide so much that all the hair 
was worn off her hams slick and smooth. She 
97 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

looked mighty ridiculous when her back was 
turned, and it came into my fool head that a 
charge of small shot in the smooth place would 
be mighty surprising to her and help out the 
fun a whole lot. She couldn't get at me on the 
ledge, so I was perfectly safe to play jokes on 
her, and I wanted to see her jump. So I 
shoved the gun out through a bush and turned 
it loose. She was sixty yards away and the 
shot stung her good without doing any great 
harm. 

"'Woof!' said the old bear as she jumped 
four feet high, and when she lit she was as 
mad as a wet hen. She looked up at the ledge, 
but couldn't see me, and she looked all around 
for somebody or something to blame for her 
trouble. Not a thing was in sight to account 
for it. She sat down sort of sideways, reached 
around with one paw to scratch where it hurt 
and thought the matter over. I had to stuff 
grass in my mouth to keep from howling with 
laughter at the way she cocked her head and 
seemed to be sizing up the situation while she 
scratched the stinging place. 

"The cubs had stopped playing at the sound 
of the gun and run up close to her, and they 
were watching her for further orders. The 
98 



THE ADVENTURES OF PIKE 

old girl finally got her eye on them, and she 
looked at them solemnly for half a minute, 
and it was plain as print she was beginning to 
have suspicions. Then she was sure she had 
the thing figured out, and she fetched first one 
and then the other a cuff that sent them rolling 
ten feet away. When they got up bawling she 
was right there and gave them, the darndest 
spanking two innocent cubs ever got. Every 
time she hit one he would go heels over head 
and yell blue murder, and by the time he got 
up she gave him another belt, scolding like an 
old woman all the time. It seemed to me I 
could almost hear her say, 'Play tricks on your 
mammy, will ye? I'll teach ye. Get along 
home without your supper, ye little scamps, 
and take that.' And so she went through the 
woods spanking her babies, and they a' yelling 
for keeps and not knowing what they were be- 
ing licked for, and I rolled around on top of 
the ledge, kicking my heels in the air and just 
bellowing with laughter. 

"I thought that was the end of the funniest 
time I ever had with a bear, but it wasn't. 
Along about the first of March there was a 
warm spell in the mountains, and I went down 
the South FgrJ^ (£p^ Devil's Gulch, which heads 
99 

LOFC 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

up toward Signal Peak, to look over a timber 
claim and see if it was worth taking- up. It 
was one of those warm days that take the snap 
out of a man, and I got tired and went to sleep 
under a tree. When I waked a bear had me 
half covered up with leaves and was piling on 
more. I wasn't cold, and didn't need any cov- 
ering, but she seemed to think I did, and ] 
reckoned the best thing to do was to keep still 
and let her finish the job. She seemed so ser- 
ious about it that I didn't dare take it as a 
joke and try any tricks on her, but I couldn't 
figure out what her game was. She covered 
me with oak leaves, pine-needles and dirt from 
head to foot, and then all was still. I couldn't 
see, and I didn't dare to lift my head and 
shake off the leaves. 

"After a while I made up my mind to take 
some chances to find out if the bear was on 
watch, and I wiggled my foot. Nothing hap- 
pened, so I wiggled it a little harder. Then I 
felt around slowly until I got hold of my gun, 
and when I had that where I could handle it, I 
jumped up and shook the leaves and dirt from 
my face. The bear was gone. I had a sort of 
notion of what she was driving at, and so I 
fixed up the pile of leaves just as she had left 
them, went up the hill a little way and shinned 
a tree. 

"About half an hour later the bear came 
100 



THE ADVENTURES OF PIKE 

back, leading two half-grown cubs so thin you 
could count their slats, and I recognized the 
interesting family I had met and had fun with 
in the fall. She was saying things to them 
in bear-talk, sort of whining and grunting, and 
they wobbled along behind her up to that pile 
of leaves. The cubs laid down with their 
tongues hanging out as if they were pretty 
tired, and the old girl tackled the pile con- 
fidently. It was plain enough that she had 
cached me for dinner, gone home into the 
gulch after the cubs and brought them back to 
have a square meal after being holed up for 
two or three months. 

"The old bear made only two or three dabs 
at the pile when she began to suspect something 
was wrong, and then she sailed into it like a 
steam, shovel. She made leaves and dirt fly so 
fast out between her hind legs that the cubs 
had to get out of the way or be buried, and the 
more she dug, the more excited she got. She 
worked over that pile and all the ground for 
ten feet around it until she was down to the 
frost, and when she finally got it through her 
head that the cupboard was bare, she was the 
most foolish-looking critter a man ever saw. 
She stood there blinking at the cubs, who were 
sniffing at the rubbish she had scattered about, 
101 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

and couldn't explain to them what had become 
of that square meal, and I reckon the cubs had 
it put up that mamma was getting light-headed 
and having dreams. They quit prospecting and 
sat down and looked at her and whined, and 
that set her off again raking over all the leaves 
in the neighborhood as if she hoped to find 
me hiding under them. Pretty soon she struck 
some kind of a root that was good to eat, and 
she braced up and called the cubs and showed 
it to 'em as if that was what she had been hunt- 
ing for all the time. She made more fuss over 
that root than there was any call for and pre- 
tended it was the greatest thing a bear ever 
struck in the woods, and the cubs were so glad 
to get anything that they allowed roots were 
good enough and forgot all about what she had 
promised them. 

"If her pelt had been good and the cubs had 
been big enough, I reckon I'd have got even 
with her for caching me, but she wasn't worth 
skinning and the cubs were no good for grub. 
It was getting late and I was tired of my tree, 
so I ploughed up the dirt under her nose with 
a load of shot and let out a yell, and she herded 
those culjs off into the brush and lit out for 
Devil's Gulch, and I went home. That was the 
nearest I ever came to being eaten up by bears." 

102 



CHAPTER VIII. 

IN THE BIG SNOW. 

The winter of 1889-90 is memorable in Cali- 
fornia as the winter of "the big snow." In the 
latter part of January the Central Pacific line 
over the Sierra Nevada was blockaded, and 
three or four passenger trains were imprisoned 
in the drifts for more than two weeks. Pass- 
ing through the blockade and over the range 
afoot, I walked at times above the tops of the 
telegraph poles, and think it no exaggeration 
to estimate the depth of snow at the higher 
altitudes at 25 feet. Drifts in the canyons 
must have been more than double the depth of 
the snow on a level. The storm was general 
and the snowfall throughout the mountain re- 
gion was extraordinary, not only for quantity 
but for rapidity. It can snow more inches to 
the hour in the high Sierra than feet to the 
week anywhere else, and the big storm of 
1890 broke all previous records. 

Miners' cabins in the gulches and hunters' 
shacks on the mountains were buried in a night 
and the occupants had to tunnel their way out. 

103 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

Deer fled from the slopes down into secluded 
glens which had been their safe refuge from 
Sierra storms before, but the white death fol- 
lowed them and softly folded its feathery 
wings about them. In the spring the dead deer 
were found in hundreds where they had 
"yarded" safely through many winters before 
the big snow. Warm weather before the storm 
had brought the bears out of their holes and 
set them to foraging for grub. The snow fell 
lightly and no crust formed for some time, and 
bruin could not wallow through it. The best 
he could do was to get under the lee of a log 
or ledge, take another nap and nurse his in- 
convenient appetite. Being a philosopher, 
bruin did the best he could and trusted the god 
of the wild things to do the rest. 

Upon the long western slope of a big spraw- 
ling mountain in Sierra county a Grizzly dam 
and two gaunt cubs of the vintage of '89 were 
caught in the big snow miles away from the 
deep gulch in which they had passed the win- 
ter. No doubt that dam was weatherwise 
enough to sense the coming storm in time to 
have returned to the den, but neither beast nor 
man could have guessed what a thick blanket 
of white the gray clouds were about to lay upon 

104 



IN THE BIG SNOW 

the land. When the flakes began to fall thickly 
Mother Grizzly quit digging roots and turn- 
ing over rocks, and sought shelter. The long 
slope was smooth and bare, but down near the 
foot was a fallen pine with upturned roots, 
and into the hollow where the roots had been, 
under the lee of the matted mass of fibre and 
dirt, Mother Grizzly led her babies and there 
made her bed for the night. It was a longer 
night than the old bear expected. It lasted 
until the next day's westering sun made a pale, 
bluish glimmer through the upper part of the 
drift that covered the fallen tree and filled up 
the hollow. The warmth of their bodies had 
kept an open space around the bears, and the 
upturned roots of the pine had prevented the 
snow from piling high directly over them, 
while causing it to drift and form an enclosing 
barrier in front of the shallow pit made by the 
uprooting of the tree. Mother Grizzly atose 
and struggled toward the dim glimmer of 
light, but she could not break her way out. 
The snow was light and dry and would not 
pack, and her bufferings only brought a feath- 
ery smother down upon her and the cubs. All 
she accomplished was to let down the frail 
roofing of the den and get a glimpse of the sky. 

105 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

She tried to climb up the drift, but sank out 
of sight and had to back out of the smother. 
Digging was futile, for the snow offered 
scarcely more resistance than foam. 

So Mother Grizzly gave up her attempt to 
escape and busied herself with making the hol- 
low as comfortable as possible for a long stay. 
She scraped down to the dirt and packed the 
snow about the sides of the lair, stowed the 
cubs against the back of the den and curled 
herself in front of them and waited for better 
times to come. 

It is a proverb of the Spaniards that "who 
sleeps, dines," and bears attest its truth, for 
it is their experience through the long, cold 
weeks of winter, when the snow is deep and no 
food is to be got at. Doubtless the old she bear 
was content to go to sleep again and forget her 
hunger, but it may be supposed that the cubs 
had not learned the philosophy of necessity, 
and kept her awake with fretful demands 
which she could not satisfy. Had the family 
remained holed up in the winter den and not 
been tempted out by mild weather to break 
the long fast, probably the desire for food 
would have remained dormant, but the taste of 
food awakened appetite, and exercise sharp- 
106 



IN THE BIG SNOW 

ened it and created insistent necessity for its 
satisfaction. The normal period of hibernation 
having passed, dreams were no longer accept- 
able substitutes for dinner. So the hungry, 
worrying cubs would not let their dam sleep, 
and she soon became as ravenous as they and 
impatient of imprisonment. 

Every day Mother Grizzly tried the barrier 
to find a way out, but for more than two weeks 
the snow was without a crust that would sus- 
tain the weight of a dog, and she could only 
flounder into the drift a few feet and struggle 
out again. Then a light drizzle of rain came, 
and the next night there was a sharper tingle 
in the air, a promise of cold weather, and crust 
began to form. In a day or two more it would 
be firm enough to travel upon, and the old 
Grizzly would lead her starving cubs down into 
the foothills and hunt for a stray calf or a 
sheep with which to feed them. 

The big snow obliterated mountain roads 
and trails, and the mail was carried to many 
of the smaller mountain settlements by men on 
snowshoes, who took the shortest feasible 
routes and found smooth traveling a dozen or 
fifteen feet above the rough, rock-strewn 
ground. A Sierra carrier on skis — the long, 
107 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

wooden Norwegian snowshoes — with a letter 
pouch strapped to his shoulders, was tempted 
by the light crust to leave the ridge and shorten 
his journey by making a cut-off down the long, 
smooth slope. A minute's swift rush down 
that slope would save hours of weary plodding 
above the heads of the gulches. 

The carrier studied the stretch of gleaming 
white carefully to select his course, and deter- 
mined on a line passing a little below the roots 
of the fallen pine, which were indicated by a 
slight fold in the blanket of snow. Setting 
his steel-shod staff under his left arm pit to 
serve as brake and rudder and throwing his 
weight upon it, the carrier ranged his skis 
parallel, the right in advance a few inches, 
fixed his attention upon the range mark he had 
chosen, gave a slight push with the staff and 
got under way. The crust bore his weight 
easily, and in two seconds he was gliding swift- 
ly. In five seconds more he was speeding like 
an arrow from the bow, and the ringing of 
the steel staff point against the crust arose in 
a high clear note above the grating sound of 
the sliding skis. 

Mother Grizzly heard the strange sound, 
which was unlike anything of which she knew 
108 




She Lunged Forward to Meet the Charge 



IN THE BIG SNOW 

the meaning, and cuffing the whining cubs into 
instant silence, she started cautiously up the 
barrier to see what was going on or what dan- 
ger menaced. Her frequent attempts to get 
out of the hole had made an inclined trench, 
which came to the surface a few yards from 
the protruding tree roots, and when she reached 
the upper end and put her head above the crust 
she saw a man rushing down the mountain 
straight toward her with the speed of a falling 
stone. 

The green glint came into the grizzly's eyes, 
her teeth clashed together in quick, sharp 
strokes, like the chattering of a chilled bather, 
and she lunged forward and upward to meet 
the charge. If the man saw her at all, it was 
too late to swerve from his course or swing his 
staff forward for a weapon. His right ski pass- 
ed under the bear's foreleg and he flew head- 
long over her, hurtled through the air and 
crashed through the snow crust a dozen yards 
beyond her. One of the skis was broken and 
torn from his foot, and even if his leg had not 
been broken he would have been helpless where 
he fell. 

Mother Grizzly and the starving cubs broke 
their fast, and two or three days later they 

109 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

went away over the frozen snow to the foot- 
hills. The men who went out in search of the 
missing carrier, and followed his trail to the 
fallen pine, brought back the mail pouch and 
something in a grain sack. They told me what 
they found, but it was not a pleasing tale and it 
is best that it be not retold. 



110 



CHAPTER IX. 
boston's big bear fight. 

A small party of hunters sat by a campfire 
in a tamarack grove in the high Sierra. Their 
guide was William Larkin, Esq., alias "Old 
Bill," a man who had lived in the mountains for 
forty years and learned many things worth tell- 
ing about. A new Winchester rifle that was 
being cleaned was the immediate provocation of 
some reminiscent remarks on the subject of 
pump-guns. 

"We old mossbacks are slow to see anything 
good, in new contraptions," said Mr. Larkin, 
after begging a Turkish cigarette from the 
Dude and lighting it with the Dude's patent 
pocket lamp, "but I'm just beginning to get it 
socked home into my feeble old intellect that 
things ain't naturally no account just because 
I never seen 'em afore. I stuck to it for a good 
many years that an old muzzle-loading rifle was 
the best shooting tool that ever was or ever 
could be made, but an old she-bear with one of 
my bullets through her lungs taught me differ- 
ill 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

ent by clawing all the clothes and half the meat 
off my back. I'm learning slowly, and I ain't 
too old to learn some more. If I live long 
enough I'll know consid'able yit. 

"I remember the first pump-gun that came 
into these mountains. It was a Henry sixteen- 
shooter, and it blew in along with a kid from 
Boston who wanted to kill a bear. The young 
chap's uncle tried to convince him that killing 
a California Grizzly was not as much fun as 
some folks pretended, but the Boston boy 
couldn't be convinced, and so the uncle hired 
me to go along and take care of him. Boston 
had a gun in a case, and I told him to keep it 
there until we got to my bear pasture. The 
rest of his outfit was 500 cartridges and a box 
of paper collars. 

"When we got into camp over on the South 
Fork, Boston wanted to begin the slaughter 
right away and opened up that gun case. I'd 
heard of the repeating rifle, but had it put up 
for a Yankee lie, and when the boy pulled out 
the gun I thought he had made a mistake and 
brought along some scientific contrivance from 
his college. He told me it was a Henry rifle 
and showed me how it worked, but I had no 
use for it. While he stuffed his pump-gun I 

112 



BOSTON'S BIG BEAR FIGHT 

smoked and thought. 'Unless you go slow, Mr. 
Larkin,' says I to myself, 'you'll get into plenty 
of trouble. Here you are, mixed up with some- 
thing that you don't sabe pretty well. A rough 
canyon, two hound dogs and an able-bodied 
bear is a combination that you can work, but 
when you throw in a college boy and a gun that 
winds up like a clock and shoots till the cows 
come home, the situation looks kind of misty.' 
I didn't think much of the pump-gun, but for 
all I knew it might go off at both ends and paw 
up everything by the roots, and I was tolerable 
sure that Boston would wobble it around so's 
to take in a pretty consid'able scope of outdoors. 
But I allowed I was old fashioned enough to 
circumvent a Boston boy and his new gun, and 
concluded to go ahead. 

"Next morning we put the dogs into Devil's 
Gulch, and by making a cut over a spur we got 
about two miles below them and sat down to 
wait for bear. The trees were so tall and so 
close together that you couldn't see the tops 
and the sun never saw the ground. The canyon 
was narrow and the sides were so steep that 
they tucked under at the bottom. While we sat 
there I figured a bit on what was going to hap- 
pen. There was a light breeze, and presently I 
113 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

noticed something on the other side of the can- 
yon, about fifty yards away. The wind swayed 
some bushes that grew around a charred stump, 
and from time to time the black end of the 
stump showed up and then disappeared very 
much like a bear's head peeping out of the 
brush. 

"Pretty soon the dogs made a row up the 
gulch, and as the howls and yells and promis- 
cuous uproar came nearer I knew they had 
started a bear and made him get a wiggle on. 
Boston danced around in great excitement, and 
when I pointed to the black stump he was ready 
to see bears most anywhere. 'You take care of 
that,' says I, 'and I'll go and see what ails the 
dogs.' He opened fire on the stump, and I 
dodged from tree to tree up the gulch until I 
was out of range. 

"I never was in a battle, but if they made any 
more noise at Bull Run than Boston was mak- 
ing, I'm glad I wasn't there. I thought I was 
running away from the biggest fight on record. 
It was what our military authors call 'a contin- 
ual roll of musketry.' But while running away 
from one battle I piled into another and had all 
the fight I needed on my hands. The dogs and 
two bears were mixed up in some sort of dis- 

114 



BOSTON'S BIG BEAR FIGHT 

agreement about things in general, and I was 
in it, as the Dude would say, with both feet and 
a crutch. We got some tangled, but things 
came my way pretty soon, and when the bears 
were laid out I stopped to listen. The fight was 
still going on down the canyon. The boy is 
still holding his own, I thought ; it would be a 
pity to spoil such a battle. So I went on and 
dressed my bears, while the steady roll of mus- 
ketry thundered in the gulch. Then I had a 
wash in the creek, had a smoke and sat down at 
the foot of a tree and fell asleep. The last I 
heard was a monotonous uproar indicating that 
the forces down the gulch were stubbornly 
holding their ground. 

"I never did know how long I slept, but when 
I awoke all was quiet. Perhaps it was the si- 
lence following the cessation of hostilities that 
awakened me. I set out to find Boston, and 
groped my way down the gulch through a 
cloud of smoke. Presently I came to the scene 
of the fray. Where my hero had made his first 
and last stand was a stack of empty shells and 
the pump-gun so hot that it had set the dry 
leaves afire, but the bear hunter was gone. I 
yelled, but got no answer. I looked for tracks 
up and down the canyon, but there were no 
tracks. The kid had vanished. 

115 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

"Then I climbed up the side of the canyon, 
high enough to see the tops of trees that stood 
in the bottom of the gulch. Near the scene of 
hostilities was a giant sugar pine, the top of 
which had been broken off. Boston had shin- 
ned up that tree when his ammunition gave out, 
and when I discovered him he was balancing 
himself upon the broken shaft and reaching out 
over his head into space for more limbs." 



no 



CHAPTER X. 

YOSEMITE. 

"Yosemite" is an Indian word, signifying 
"place of the Grizzly bear," and appropriately 
the Yosemite National Park is made a sanc- 
tuary for the California Grizzly by the regula- 
tions forbidding hunting or the carrying of 
firearms within its borders. Danger of ex- 
tinction of the species, which was an imminent 
menace when the park was established, was 
averted by that act, and doubtless the bears 
have increased in numbers under protection of 
the United States. They were quite plentiful 
in that part of the Sierra Nevada in the early 
90's, when, as State Forester, I co-operated 
with the first superintendent of the National 
Park, Capt. Wood, Fourth U. S. Cavalry, in 
driving out the sheep-men with their devastat- 
ing flocks of "hoofed locusts," and protecting 
the Sierra forests from fire. 

During the first two or three years of the 
Park's legal existence the hunting of deer was 
prohibited, but bear-hunting was permitted, and 
117 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

Captain Wood, Lieut. Davis and I devoted con- 
siderable time to the sport in the autumn of 
1 89 1. The Captain and I learned to appreciate 
the distinction between bear-hunting and bear- 
killing very keenly during that season. For 
example, I cut the trails of no less than thirteen 
bears in two days in the mountains north of 
Yosemite Valley and followed some of them, 
but although I succeeded in getting close 
enough to hustle two of the wanderers out of 
a leisurely walk into a lope, I never saw hair 
through my rifle sight. Having no dogs, of 
course, it was all still-hunting and trailing, 
with the long-odds chance of jumping a bear 
in the brush by sheer accident. 

Late in the tourist season, bears came down 
out of the high mountains into the Yosemite 
Valley and made tracks in the Bridal Veil 
Meadows and along the stage roads, which 
were pointed out to visitors for their entertain- 
ment. The valley butcher reported bear sign 
at the place where he slaughtered beef for the 
hotel, and I tried roosting for bear in hope that 
it might prove better than still-hunting. There 
was a platform in a tree at the slaughtering 
place and I sat there through one chilly night 
without hearing or seeing any bear sign. The 
118 



YOSEMITE 

next night an eager tourist persuaded me to 
give him a share of the perch, and we roosted 
silently and patiently until after midnight. 
Hearing a bear coming through the brush, I 
touched my companion gently to attract his at- 
tention. He had fallen into a doze, and, awak- 
ening with a start at my touch he dropped his 
shotgun from the platform. The stock was 
broken, one of the hammers struck upon a log 
and a load of buckshot went whistling through 
the leaves of our tree. Then we went home. 
It was an accident ; the man meant well, and he 
was very sorry, and I held my tongue. 

The next afternoon I was one of a small 
party on a drive over the roads at the lower 
end of the valley, and of course had no gun. 
A bear broke out of the brush, crossed the road 
fifty yards ahead of the team and went down 
to the meadow. It was not expedient to say all 
that occurred to me before comparative strang- 
ers; so I jumped from the buckboard, picked 
up a cudgel and lit out after that bear on a 
lope. He had a good start and when he dis- 
covered that he was being followed he clawed 
dirt to increase his lead and beat me out to the 
bank of the Merced. For a moment he hesi- 
tated about going into the swift water, but he 

119 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

decided that he would rather swim than listen 
to offensive personalities, and over the bank 
he plunged. 

It was a relief to sit there, watching him 
swim the rapids, and feel free to say all the 
things I hadn't said to the man who dropped 
the gun, with a few general observations on 
the perversity of bears and bear-hunters' luck 
thrown in for good measure. 

Bears were all over the place that year. 
They blundered into the roads at night and 
scared teams, broke into the cabin in Mariposa 
Grove and ate up all the grub and a sack of 
sugar pine seed worth a dollar a pound, and 
Captain Wood and I never got a shot in three 
weeks' of diligent hunting. The only man who 
had any luck was Lieutenant Davis ; that is, not 
counting Private McNamara, who had bigger 
luck than a man who wounds a big Grizzly and 
runs really has coming to him. McNamara's 
luck will be seen later. 

Davis killed two bears on the Perigord Mea- 
dows and one on Rush Creek, and wounded a 
large Grizzly in Devil's Gulch. It was a lucky 
shot that he miade in the dark on Rush Creek. 
A troop horse had died about a quarter of a 
mile below the cavalry camp, on the edge of the 
120 



YOSEMITE 

National Park, and the men had seen bear 
tracks around the carcass. Davis and an Illi- 
nois preacher, who was roughing it for his 
health with the troopers, took their blankets 
one night and camped about thirty yards from 
the dead horse to await the coming of the bear. 
The moon was not due to rise until about mid- 
night, and Davis pulled off his boots, rolled up 
in his blanket and went to sleep. The preach- 
er was not sleepy, and was not entirely confi- 
dent that it was bear nature to wait for moon- 
light before starting out on the prowl. So he 
made a small fire and sat beside it, toasting his 
toes and thinking of things. 

Just before midnight Davis awoke, looked at 
his watch, and said: "Well, parson, it is about 
time for the moon to show up, and the bear is 
likely to come pretty soon. You'd better put 
out your fire." 

The preacher shoved some dirt over the em- 
bers with his foot, and Davis had just returned 
his watch to his pocket, when the sound of the 
crunching of gravel was heard from the bank 
just above the carcass. Davis looked up and 
could just make out a huge dark form on trie 
edge of the bank. He raised his carbine and 
fired point blank at the dark mass, and the re- 

121 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

port was answered by an angry growl. The 
bear leaped down the bank toward the hunters, 
and Davis sprang to his feet, dropping the car- 
bine, and jumped into the creek, revolver in 
hand, to get into clear righting ground. In do- 
ing so, he had to jump toward the bear, but he 
preferred close quarters in the creek bed, where 
the water was knee deep, toy a scrimmage in 
the brush. 

The preacher ran for his carbine, which was 
leaning against a tree twenty feet distant, but 
he had no opportunity to use it, for the bear 
made but one more plunge and fell into the 
water with the death gurgle in his throat, 
When Davis was certain that the bear was 
done for, he and the preacher ventured to ex- 
amine the beast. They found that Davis had 
made one of the luckiest shots on record, hav- 
ing sent a carbine bullet through the heart of 
the big cinnamon bear, although he had taken 
no aim, and, when he fired, could not distin- 
guish the bear's head from his tail. 

They pulled the dead bear out of the water, 
and by the light of the moon, which had risen 
over the mountain, the preacher curiously ex- 
amined the teelh and formidable claws of the 
first wild bear he had ever seen. He felt of the 

122 



YOSEMITE 

animal's enormous, muscular legs, and was pro- 
foundly impressed with the great strength of 
the brute. 

"Well," said Davis, after he had inspected 
the body sufficiently, "we might as well turn 
in and sleep the rest of the night. The trail 
back to camp is too rough to follow in the 
night." And so saying he rolled up in his 
blankets. 

"Sleep !" said the preacher; " sleep with those 
dum things wandering about! Not much." 
And the preacher rebuilt his fire, climbed upon 
a log, and roosted there, with cocked carbine, 
until daybreak, while the Lieutenant slept and 
snored. 

The "other story" is about Private Mc- 
Namara, a Grizzly, and some gray squirrels. 
McNamara got leave to go hunting, and went 
over to Devil's Gulch, the roughest canyon in 
the country and the best hiding place for big 
game. McNamara had good luck, and killed 
about a dozen gray squirrels, which he slung 
to his belt. He had turned homeward, and 
was picking his way through the fallen timber, 
when a Grizzly arose from behind a log about 
fifty yards away. McNamara raised his car- 
bine and fired. The bear howled and started 

123 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

for him, and McNamara felt in his belt for 
another cartridge, but none was there. He had 
fired his last shot. 

McNamara realized that he had to trust to 
his legs to ge\ him out of that scrape, and he. 
turned and ran faster than he ever sprinted in 
his life. But the bear was the better runner, 
and gained rapidly. The dangling squirrels 
impeded McNamara' s action, and as he ran he 
tried to get rid of them. He pulled two loose 
and dropped them, and the Grizzly stopped to 
investigate. Bruin found them good, and he 
ate them in two gulps and resumed the chase. 

McNamara dropped some more squirrels 
and gained a good lead, and then he unhooked 
his belt and dropped all that were left, and 
when the Grizzly finished the lot McNamara 
was out 'of sight across the river and getting 
his second wind for a long run home. 



124 



CHAPTER XL 

THE RIGHT OF WAY. 

"It was pretty late in the season," said my 
friend, the prospector, "when I took a notion 
that I'd like to see what sort of a country lies 
north of the Umpqua River, in Oregon, and I 
struck into the mountains from Drain Station 
with my prospecting' outfit and as much grub 
as I could pack upon my horse. After leaving 
Elk Creek I followed a hunting trail for a day, 
but after that it was rough scrambling up and 
down mountain sides and through gulches, and 
the horse and I had a pretty tough time. The 
Umpqua Mountains are terribly steep and wild 
and it's no fool of a job to cross them. 

"There is any amount of game in those 
mountains, and where I went it never is hunt- 
ed, and, therefore, not hard to find. If I had 
cared to shoot much, I could have killed a 
great many bears, but I wasn't in there for 
fun so much as for business, and I didn't shoot 
but one. Bear meat is no good at any time un- 
less a man is starving, according to my notions, 

125 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

and in the summer it is worse than no good. 
Before berries are ripe a bear goes around claw- 
ing the bark from logs and dead trees and feeds 
on the borers and ants. He has a banquet 
when he strikes a well-populated ant heap, and 
then he smells and tastes like ants if you try to 
eat him. His meat is rank, and if you eat it 
for a day or two you will break out all over 
with a sort of rash that is mightily uncomfort- 
able. There is no fur on a bear in summer 
and his skin is not worth taking, so you see 
there was no reason why I should fool away 
time and cartridges on Bruin. Besides, I rather 
like Bruin for his comical ways, and when he 
doesn't bother me, I'd rather watch him than 
shoot at him. 

"I had to kill one big brown fellow, because 
he wouldn't get out of my way and my horse 
was afraid to pass him. He was on a narrow 
ridge that I was following in order to keep 
out of the heavy timber, and the bear sat upon 
his haunches right in my way. P'robably he 
never saw a man before, for he didn't seem to 
be in the least disturbed when I hove in sight 
leading the horse. I supposed he would drop 
on all fours and scuttle away, but not a bit of 
it. He had struck something new and was go- 

126 



THE RIGHT OF WAY 

ing to see the whole show. There he sat, with 
his forepaws hanging down and his head 
cocked on one side, looking at the procession 
with the liveliest curiosity in his face. There 
was nothing wicked in his appearance, and if 
it hadn't been for the horse . I think I would 
have passed within three yards of him without 
any trouble. As it was, I dragged the horse 
up to within twenty feet, but then he hung 
back, snorted and protested so vigorously that 
1 was afraid he would back over the edge and 
fall down the steep mountain side. 

"Letting the horse back away a few yards, 
I tied his halter to a scrub tree and then ad- 
vanced toward the bear with my rifle in my left 
hand. He didn't budge, and when I yelled at him 
he only started a little and cocked his head over 
on the other side. That made me laugh, and 
then I amused myself by talking to him. 'Why 
don't you move?' said I . T know you got here 
first and have a squatter claim on the quarter- 
section, but you ought not to sit down on pub- 
lic travel in that way.' He looked at me as 
though I was the oddest specimen he ever came 
across, and scratched his ear with his left paw. 

" 'You musn't mind my friend here,' I said, 
pointing to the horse; 'he's a little shy in so- 
127 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

ciety, but he means well. If you'll move to 
one side, we'll pass on.' It was a fool sort of 
an idea, standing there and talking to a bear, 
but I was interested in studying the expression 
of his face and seeing how puzzled he seemed 
to be at the sound of my voice. He'd rub his 
ear or his nose once in a while, and then look 
up, as though he were saying : '■ Just repeat 
that ; I don't quite make out what you are driv- 
ing at,' and then he'd assume a look of the 
most intense interest. I don't know how long 
he would have remained there, but I got tired 
of the fun and threw a stick at him. It would 
have hit him on the nose, but he warded it off 
very cleverly, and then his manner changed. 
He growled a little and began swaying his 
head from side to side, and when I saw the 
green glint come into his eyes — the danger 
signal that all the carnivorae flash and all 
hunters heed — I knew the time was up for airy 
persiflage and that I was in for a 'scambling 
and unquiet time' unless I promptly took up 
the quarrel. It was an easy shot, through the 
throat to the base of the skull, and the bullet 
smashed the spinal cord. 

"That was the only bear, other than a Griz- 
zly, that I ever saw dispute the right of way of 
a man through the woods." 

128 



CHAPTER XII. 



WELL HEELED. 



"Curious how some men will lose their grip 
on the truth when they talk about bears," said 
Mr. Jack Waddell, of Ventura. "There's old 
Ari Hopper, for example, a man whose word 
is good in a hoss trade, but when he tells about 
his bear fights he puts your confidence in him 
to an awful strain. I don't say that Ari would 
tell lies, but he puts a whole lot of fancy frills 
on his stories and fixes 'em up gorgeous. I 
reckon I've run across most as many bears as 
anybody, but I never had no such adventures 
as I read about. 

"The most curious bear scrape I ever had 
was over on the Piru last spring, and just the 
plain facts of the case beat anything you ever 
heard. There was an old white-headed Grizzly 
in that part of the country that did a heap of 
damage, but nobody had been able to do him 
up. They set spring guns for him on the 
mountain and put out poison all around, but 
he'd beat the game every time. Taylor, of the 

129 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

Mutaw ranch, fixed a spring gun that he 
thought would fix the old fellow for sure. It 
was a big muzzle-loading musket, with a bore 
as big as an eight-gauge shotgun, and Taylor 
loaded it with a double handful of powder, 
thirty buckshot and a wagon bolt six inches 
long. It was set right in the trail and baited 
with a chunk of pork tied to the muzzle and 
connected with the trigger by a string. 

"The gun was about a mile from the house, 
and the very first night after it was set, Tay- 
lor was awakened by a roar that made the win- 
dows rattle and seemed to shake the very hills. 
Taylor knew the old gun had gone off, and he 
chuckled as he thought of the wreck it made 
of the old Grizzly. In the morning he started 
out to take a look at his dead bear, and found 
his tracks leading from the meadow right up 
the trail. He knew the sign, because the Griz- 
zly put only the heel of his off forefoot to the 
ground and there was a round mark in the 
track that looked as though it were made by 
the end of a bone. 

"As I was saying, Taylor recognized the 

tracks and was sure he had got old Whitehead, 

but he was sort of puzzled when he noticed a 

hog's track in the same trail and saw that those 

130 



WELL HEELED 

were sometimes wiped out by the bear's tracks. 
When he got near the spring gun he saw 
bits of meat hanging in the brush, but no fur 
anywhere. He kept on, and pretty soon he 
saw a dark mass lying on the ground in front 
of the wreck of the old musket. He stepped 
up to look at it and saw that it was the mangled 
corpse of the biggest hog on the ranch. One 
of the hams was gone, and apparently it had 
been cut away with a knife. The head and all 
the fore part of the hog had been blown to 
flinders, and the brush was just festooned with 
pork. i 

"Taylor thought somebody had happened 
along and cut a ham out of the dead hog, but 
there were no man tracks anywhere; nothing 
but hog and bear tracks. It was plain that the 
cunning old bear had driven the hog ahead of 
him up the trail to spring the gun, but that 
missing ham could not be accounted for. 

"Another curious thing was noticed about 
all the cattle that the Grizzly killed. Ordinar- 
ily, you know, the Grizzly strikes a blow that 
breaks a steer's neck or shoulder, and then pulls 
him down and finishes him. In the Piru coun- 
try a great many cattle were found with their 
throats neatly cut, and old Whitehead's tracks 

131 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

were invariably found near the carcasses. The 
only man that the Grizzly ever killed, so far as 
is known, was a Mexican sheepherder, and he 
was found with a slash in the side of the head 
that looked like the work of a hatchet or other 
sharp tool. Some people didn't believe that 
the Mexican was killed by a bear, but there 
were no other tracks where his body was found, 
and I know for a fact that old Whitehead did 
kill him. 

"I was pirooting around in the brush on a 
hill pretty well up toward the head of Pirn 
Creek one afternoon, when I caught sight of a 
bear about twenty yards ahead of me. I could 
see only a part of his fur, and couldn't tell how 
he was lying or what part of him was in sight. 
I figured around a few minutes, but couldn't 
get a better sight, and so I just took chances 
and let drive for luck at what I could see. It 
was a fool thing to do, of course, but I just 
happened to feel careless and confident. There 
was a snort and a crash, and old Whitehead 
loomed up madder than a hornet. I had shot 
him in the haunch and he felt insulted. He made 
a rush at me, and I skipped aside and jumped 
for a small tree standing on the brink of a 
little ravine. My rifle dropped into the ravine, 
and I went up the tree like a monkey up a pole, 
132 



WELL HEELED 

and by the time the old bear had put his helm 
down and swung around to take a whack at 
me I was out of his reach and felt safe. 

"The bear sat down and deliberately sized 
up the situation, and then he walked up to the 
tree and began striking at the trunk with his 
right paw. That made me laugh at first, but 
I was just paralyzed with amazement when I 
saw clean-cut chips flying at every stroke and 
caught a metallic gleam as his paw swung in 
the air. I didn't have much time to investigate 
the matter because the old Grizzly was a boss 
chopper and my tree began to totter very soon. 
I had sense enough to see that if I came down 
with the tree on the upper side the bear would 
nail me with one jump, and I threw my weight 
on the other side so as to fall the tree into> the 
ravine. I thought I might have the luck to 
land without breaking any bones, and then I'd 
have quite a start of the bear and perhaps be 
able to pick up my rifle. 

"As the tree toppled over the edge of the 
ravine and began to fall I swung around to 
the upper side and braced myself for the crash. 
During the fall I managed to throw my legs 
out over a branch, and when the tree struck 
bottom I shot out feet foremost, sliding down 
through the brushy top and landing with a 
133 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

pretty solid jar right side up and no damage 
except a few bruises and scratches. The first 
thing I looked for was my rifle, and, luckily, 
it wasn't two yards away. I grabbed it and 
ran up the other side of the ravine to a rocky 
ledge, while the Grizzly was crashing down 
through the brush on his side, expecting to 
find me under the fallen tree. Before he knew 
what had happened I was shooting him full of 
holes and he was dead in a minute. 

"When I examined the dead Grizzly I found 
the most singular thing I ever came across. 
In the sole of his right forepaw was an ivory- 
handled bowie-knife, firmly imbedded and part- 
ly surrounded by calloused gristle as hard as 
bone. The handle was out of sight, but the 
butt of it made a knob in the heel of the bear's 
foot and left a mark on the ground. Evi- 
dently he walked on that heel to keep the blade 
from striking stones and getting dulled. That 
knife accounted for all the mysteries about the 
white-headed Grizzly. 

"What's that ? Mystery about how the knife 
got into his foot? Not at all; that's simple 
enough. He swallowed the knife during some 
fight or other, and it worked around in his sys- 
tem and down into his foot just as a needle 

does in a man." 

134 



CHAPTER XIII. 



SMOKED OUT. 



What a bear may do under given circum- 
stances may be guessed with reasonable cer- 
tainty by one who has had experience, but it 
is not always safe to risk much on the ae- 
on acy of the guess. Bruin's general nature is 
not to be depended upon in special cases. He 
has individual characteristics and eccentricities 
and is subject to freaks, and these variations 
from the line of conduct which he is expected 
to follow are what makes most of the trouble 
for people who are after his pelt. Morgan 
Clark, the old bear hunter of Siskiyou, never 
hesitates about going into a den in the winter 
to drive out :a; bear, provided the cavern is wide 
enough to let the bear pass him. He takes a 
torch in his hand and stalks boldly in, because 
his experience has made the proceeding seem 
perfectly safe. 

"All you've got to do," says Morgan, "is to 
stand to one side and keep quiet, and the bear'll 
just scoot by without noticing you. It's the 
135 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

light that's bothering him, and all he's thinking 
about is getting out of that hole as fast as he 
can. He don't like the smoke and the fire, and 
he won't pay any attention to anything else 
until he gets outside, but then you want to 
look out. He goes for the first live thing in 
sight when he's clear of the cave and the 
smudge, and he don't go very slow either. Jim 
Brackett found that out over in Squaw Valley 
one day. He found a bear in a den, and built 
a fire at the mouth to smoke him out. The 
fire was burning rather slowly, Brackett 
thought, and he stood looking around and wait- 
ing for something to happen. While he had 
his back turned to the den something did hap- 
pen, and it happened dog-gone sudden. That 
fire was plenty fast enough for the bear, and 
the old cuss came out without waiting to be 
choked. He came out galleycahoo, and the 
first thing he saw was Brackett leaning on his 
gun and waiting for the show to begin. He 
just grabbed Brackett by the back of the neck 
and slammed him around through the man- 
zanita brush like a dog shaking a groundhog. 
Brackett told me that he never felt so sur- 
prised and hurt in his life. He hadn't cal'lated 
on that bear coming out for a good two min- 
136 



SMOKED OUT 

utes more; but mebbe the bear had stronger 
objections to smoking than Brackett knew. If 
it hadn't been for Brackett's little cur dog, that 
he supposed wasn't fit for nothing but bark- 
ing at chipmunks, I reckon the bear would 
have chawed and thumped the life out of him. 
The cur seemed to tumble to the situation right 
away, and he went for the bear's heels in good 
shape. It generally takes time and a few knock- 
out cuffs from bear's paw to teach a dog that 
there's two ends to a bear and only one of them 
safe to tackle, but that little ornery kiyi knew 
it from the start. If there's anything a bear 
can't stand, it's a dog nipping his heels, and 
when the cur began snapping at his hind legs 
and yelping, he lost interest in Brackett and 
attended to the disturbance in the rear. The 
little cuss was cute and spry enough to keep 
out of his reach, though, and he made such a 
nuisance of himself, without doing any serious 
damage of course, that the bear got disgusted 
with the whole performance and hiked out 
through the brush. Brackett was hurt too 
badly to follow him or to fire a gun, and it was 
two months before he was able to get around. 
But he wouldn't have sold that little scrub cur 
for all the money he ever saw." 

137 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

Budd Watson, who used to hunt and trap on 
the Pitt River and the McCloud, had an adven- 
ture with a bear that didn't conduct his part 
of the hunt according to Hoyle, Budd and 
Joe Mills tracked a big Cinnamon to a den in 
the mountains near the McCloud and built a 
big smudge to smoke him out. The wind blew 
the wrong way to drive the smoke in, and so 
Budd took a torch and went after the bear, 
leaving Mills on guard outside. Like Morgan 
Clark, he knew the bear would pass him head 
down and make for the open air without de- 
lay, and he wasn't afraid. When the bear got 
up with a growl at the appearance of the torch 
and started for the exit, Budd quietly stepped 
aside and gave him room to pass, but the Cin- 
namon developed individuality in an unexpect- 
ed direction and made a grab for Budd's right 
leg as he passed. Budd threw his leg up to 
avoid the grab, lost his balance and fell flat on 
top of the bear. Instinctively he caught hold 
of the thick fur on the bear's hind quarters 
with both hands, still holding the torch in his 
right, but dropping his gun, and winding his 
legs about the bear's body he rode out into' the 
daylight before he hardly knew what had hap- 
pened. 

Mills was ready to shoot when the bear ap- 
138 



SMOKED OUT 

peared, but seeing his partner riding the game, 
he was too much surprised to take the brief 
chance offered at the bears head, and in an- 
other instant it was too late. To fire after the 
pair had passed was too dangerous, as he might 
hit the rider instead of the steed. The Cinna- 
mon, in his first panic, plunged wildly down 
the hill, trying to shake off his strange burden, 
and went so rapidly that Budd was afraid to 
let go. But Budd's principal fear was that the 
bear would recover his presence of mind and 
turn upon him, and his game was to keep the 
beast on the jump as long as he could, trusting 
to chance for a way out of the scrape. 

The torch, made of rags soaked in oil, was 
still blazing in his right hand. Taking i 
firmer grip with his legs and a good hold just 
above the tail with his teeth, he applied the 
torch to the bear's rump. This application and 
the hair-raising yells of Mills, who was plung- 
ing along madly in the wake, caused an aston- 
ishing burst of speed, and the Cinnamon thund- 
ered through the brush like a runaway locomo- 
tive on a down grade, with such lurches and 
rolls and plunges that Budd dropped his torch 
and hung on, tooth and nail, for dear life. 

The unfeeling Mills was taking a frivolous 
view of the case by this time, and as he strode 

139 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

rapidly along behind, losing ground at every 
jump, however, he encouraged Budd and the 
bear alternately with flippant remarks : "Stick 
to him, Budd! Whoaouw! Go it bar!'' 
"You're the boss bar-buster, old man. Can't 
buck you off!" "Whoopee Hellitylarrup!" 
"Who's bossing that job, Budd; you or the 
bar?" "Say Budd, goin' ter leave me here? 
Give a feller a ride, won't ye?" "Hi-yi; that's 
a bully saddle bar !" 

But Budd was waiting for a chance to dis- 
mount, and as the bear rose to leap a big log 
in his path, Budd let go all holds and slid head 
first to the ground. He bumped his forehead 
and skinned his nose on a rock. His legs and 
back were scratched and torn by the brush, his 
clothes were in tatters, and he was almost sea- 
sick from the lurching motion of his steed. 

Mills came up roaring with laughter. He 
thought it was the funniest thing- he ever had 
seen in his life. But Budd was not a man of 
much humor and he failed to appreciate the 
ridiculous features of the adventure. He got 
up slowly, ruefully brushed away the blood and 
dirt from his face, and solemnly and method- 
ically gave Joe Mills the most serious and mat- 
ter-of-fact licking that a man ever got in this 

world. 

140 



CHAPTER XIV. 

A CRY IN THE NIGHT. 

In the flickering of the camp-fire the gloom- 
ing wall of firs advanced and receded like the 
sea upon the shore, whispering, too, like the 
sea, of mysteries within its depths; for this 
is true: the wind in the forest and the wave 
upon the beach make the same music and tell 
the same strange tales. Through a rift in the 
darkening wall the last afterglow on the snow- 
cap of Mount Hood made a rosy point against 
the western sky, a "goodnight" flashed from 
the setting sun to the man by the camp-fire. 

Out from the enfolding night that fell as a 
mantle when the light died on Mount Hood, 
came a shape, followed by a shadow that seem- 
ed to be with but not of the shape. Like a 
menacing enemy the shadow dogged the steps 
of the man who came out of the night, now 
towering over him in monstrous height against 
a tree trunk, now suddenly falling backward 
and darting swiftly down a forest aisle in panic 
fear, only to spring forth with gigantic leaps 

141 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

and grotesque waxings and wanings and inane 
caperings at his heels as the firelight rose and 
fell. 

A cheery "Howdy, stranger!" drew the at- 
tention of the man by the fire — known to his 
Indian guide hy the generic name of "Bos- 
ton," which is Chinook for white man — and he 
returned the greeting to 1 the tall, gray-bearded 
man who strode toward him, glad to have com- 
pany in the absence of the Indian, Doctor Tom. 
who had gone down to the Columbia for sup- 
plies. A haunch of venison confirmed the 
stranger's brief explanation that he was hunt- 
ing and made his arrival doubly welcome. 

When the pipes were lighted, Boston drew 
the old fellow out, found that he hunted for a 
living and soon had a hunt for the next day 
all arranged. They were telling camp-fire 
yarns, and the stranger was speaking in an ani- 
mated w r ay of some adventure, when Boston 
noticed a sudden change in his expression and 
an abrupt halt in his speech. 

Turning in the direction toward which the 
stranger's apprehensive gaze was directed, Bos- 
ton saw a dark figure standing motionless in 
the shadow of a fir, and he laid his hand upon 
his rifle. The figure advanced into the fire- 
142 



A CRY IN THE NIGHT 

light and Boston recognized Doctor Tom, The 
Indian said nothing, but placed his pack upon 
the ground in silence, and Boston saw him 
cast one swift, glowering look at the stranger, 
who was apparently trying to conceal his un- 
easiness under an assumption of indifference. 

Doctor Tom had travelled all day and must 
have been hungry, but he did not take any 
food out of the pack or even go to the fire for 
a cup of tea, and he shook his head when Bos- 
ton offered him a piece of broiled venison. Not 
a bite would he touch, but sat, silent and mo- 
tionless as a statue, upon a log away from the 
fire and with his back turned to the stranger. 

Boston tried to resume the camp-fire stories, 
but the grizzled hunter was thinking of some- 
thing else and replied with monosyllables 
Soon he arose, made up his pack, threw his 
rolled blanket over his shoulder and picked up 
his rifle. Boston, in some surprise, urged him 
to remain, and reminded him of the arrange- 
ment for the next day's hunt. There was a 
slight movement of Doctor Tom's head, and he 
seemed about to arise, but the almost imper- 
ceptible tension of his limbs instantly relaxed, 
and he remained apparently indifferent and un- 
heeding. 

"Fact is," said the stranger, "I forgot that 

143 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

I'd got to be up to Hood River to-morrow, and 
I reckon I'll just mosey along to-night so as 
to make it. I know the trail with my eyes 
shut." He was about to stride out of camp, 
when his eye caught Doctor Tom's old musket 
leaning against the tree. "You don't shoot with 
this?" he asked with ;a little, uneasy laugh, as 
he picked up the ancient piece and toyed with 
the lock. Boston laughingly replied, "Well, 
hardly," and the stranger replaced the gun, 
said "So long," and was lost in the gloom 

It was ten minutes before Doctor Tom 
moved, and then he got his musket and brought 
it to the fire. He lifted the hammer, removed 
the cap, and taking a pin from his waist band 
worked at the nipple until he extracted a 
splinter of wood. Then he drew the charge, 
blew down the barrel to see that it was clear 
and reloaded the musket. Doctor Tom took 
some smoked salmon from, his pouch, made a 
cup of coffee and silently ate his supper, and 
Boston began to comprehend that there was a 
reason for his refusal to eat while the stranger 
was in camp. But it was useless to try to make 
Doctor Tom talk until he had smoked, and Bos- 
ton waited patiently. 

At last Doctor Tom said, abruptly, "You 
144 



A CRY IN THE NIGHT 

know urn?" Boston replied that he did not 
know the stranger, told briefly how he came 
into camp, and by adroit questioning drew, in 
laconic sentences, a story from the taciturn In- 
dian. 

The man was a hunter, who had been a fam- 
ous bear-killer many years ago. In the days 
of muzzle-loaders he had two rifles, one of 
which was always carried for him by an Indian 
whom he hired for that service. If his first 
shot failed to kill, he handed the empty rifle 
to the Indian to exchange for the second wea- 
pon, and usually brought down his bear while 
the Indian was reloading. A member of Doc- 
tor Tom's tribe, probably a relative, was gun- 
bearer for the hunter on one of his expeditions. 
They ran across a she-bear with cubs and the 
hunter shot her, but the wound only stung her, 
and she rushed fiercely upon him. The second 
shot did not stop her, and the hunter and the 
Indian had to turn and run for their lives. 

But a Grizzly in a rage can outrun any man 
in a long race, and the angry she-bear rapidly 
overhauled her foes. The white man and the 
Indian ran side by side, although the Indian 
could have outstripped him. The red man had 
his knife in hand ready for the moment when 
145 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

the bear should seize one of them. The white 
man glanced over his shoulder, saw the bear 
lurching along within one jump of them, seized 
the Indian by the shoulders and hurled him 
backward into the very jaws of the furious 
brute. The white man escaped with his life, 
and the Indian lived just long enough to tell 
those who found him, a torn and bloody mass 
of flesh and broken bones, how he had been 
sacrificed to a coward's love of life. 

Doctor Tom told this in his uncouth jargon 
of English and Chinook, without a tremor, but 
his black eyes glowed with a gleam of light not 
reflected from the dying embers of the camp- 
fire, and Boston was glad that the stranger had 
gone. Then he knew why Doctor Tom sat 
silently apart and would taste no food while 
the stranger was in camp. The stranger might 
accept Boston's hospitality and eat salt with 
him, but the Indian would not acknowledge by 
any act that he, Doctor Tom, had any interest 
in that camp, or bind himself by Indian custom 
to treat the stranger as his guest. 

Boston awoke in the still dark hours before 

dawn and lay thinking over Doctor Tom's 

story and the demeanor of the man who had 

wandered into camp. A cry clove through the 

146 



A CRY IN THE NIGHT 

silence of the night like a lightning flash 
through a black cloud, and as the gloom be- 
comes deeper after the flash, so the silence 
seemed more intense and oppressive after that 
cry. It came from across the canyon, clear and 
far, a cry of mortal terror. 

It is a panther, thought Boston, and he lis- 
tened for its repetition or an answer from the 
mate, but the stillness was unbroken. He 
turned over to see if Doctor Tom had heard or 
noticed it, and thought the dark bundle by the 
side of the log seemed rather small for the 
sleeping Indian. Boston got up and walked 
over to the log. Doctor Tom's blanket only 
was there. Boston looked for the musket; it 
was in its old place against the tree. His own 
rifle was undisturbed. Boston concluded that 
Doctor Tom had gone for water or was off on 
some incomprehensible Indian freak, the rea- 
son of which was not worth a white man's 
time to puzzle out, rolled up in his blanket 
again and became oblivious to the realities 
around him. 

It was daylight when Boston awoke again. 
Doctor Tom had not returned. Boston made a 
fire, and while cooking breakfast he noticed 
that the Indian's long knife was gone from the 

147 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

log where he had left it sticking after supper. 
He halloed to Tom, but received no answer 
save the echo. Calmly confident of Doctor 
Tom's ability to look out for himself, Boston 
went about his business without more ado, ate 
his breakfast and was taking a second cup of 
coffee when Doctor Tom came into camp, sil- 
ent and grave as usual, but rather paler. He 
came from the direction of the canyon. 

The Indian drank some coffee and then care- 
fully took his left arm with his right hand from 
the bosom of his shirt, where it had been rest- 
ing, and said, "Broke urn." Boston examined 
the arm and found that it was badly bruised 
and broken above the elbow. He heated some 
water and bathed the arm and then told Tom 
to brace his breast against a tree and hold on 
with his right arm. Boston took hold of the 
left arm on the opposite side of the tree, braced 
his feet and pulled. Rough splints were soon 
made and applied, and a big horn of whiskey 
made Doctor Tom feel more comfortable. 
While making the splints Boston asked Tom 
for his knife, having carefully mislaid his own. 
"Lose um," said Doctor Tom, but he offered no 
more explanation. When asked how he 
broke his arm, he replied, "Fall down." Evi- 

14S 



A CRY IN THE NIGHT 

dently he had fallen down, but there were 
five odd-looking marks on his throat, and Bos- 
ton thought of that cry in the night and won- 
dered if the whispering firs could tell of an- 
other mystery hidden in the forest ; of a menac- 
ing shadow dogging the footsteps of a man 
and grappling with him in the dark. 

Boston and Doctor Tom broke camp and 
started back over the mountain on the Hood 
River trail. Boston was in the lead, and as he 
walked along he looked closely for the tracks 
of the stranger's boots, as he had said he was 
going to Hood River. There were no tracks. 
The stranger had not gone over that trail. 



149 



CHAPTER XV. 



A CAMPFIRE SYMPOSIUM. 



"Speaking of bears, Joe," said one of a party 
of hunters sitting around a campfire at old Fort 
Tejon, "Old Ari Hopper has had more queer 
experiences with bears than anybody. He has 
given up hunting now, but he used to be the 
greatest bear-killer in the mountains. Ari has 
a voice like a steam fog-horn — the effects of 
drinking a bottle of lye one night by mistake 
for something else, and when he speaks in an 
ordinary tone you can hear him several blocks 
away. You can always tell when Ari comes to 
town as soon as he strikes the blacksmith'? 
shop up at the cross-roads and says, 'Holloa' 
to the 'smith. Ari was out on the Alamo 
mountain one day and got treed by a big black 
bear—" 

"A black bear on the Alamo?" interrupted 
Dad. "There ain't nothing but Grizzlies and 
Cinnamons over there. I was over there 



150 



A CAMPFIRE SYMPOSIUM 

"Hold on, Dad, it's my turn yet. You never 
heard of a Grizzly climbing a tree, did you?" 

"Oh, well, if you've got to have your bear 
go up a tree, all right. We'll call it a black 
bear. Besides, if it's one of Ari's bear stories, 
anything goes." 

"The bear treed Ari," resumed the other, 
"and just climbed up after him in a hurry. Ari 
went up as high as he could and then shinned 
out on a long limb. The bear followed, and 
Ari kept inching out until he got as far as he 
dared trust his weight. The bear was climbing 
out after him and the limb was bending too 
much for safety when Ari yelled at the bear : 

'Go back, you d d fool. You'll break this 

limb and kill both of us. Want to break your 
cussed neck, goldarn ye?' 

"Well, sir, that bear stopped, looked at Ari, 
and then down to the ground, and then 
he just backed along the limb to the trunk, slid 
down and lit out for the brush. Ari swears 
that the bear understood him. Bears have a 
heap of sabe, but I'm inclined to think that it 
was Ari's stentorian roar that scared him 
away." 

"That's one of Ari's fairy tales," said Joe. 
"Let Ari tell it, and he has had more bear fights 

151 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

and killed more Grizzlies than anybody, but the 
fact is that his brother-in-law, Jim Freer, did 
all the killing. You never heard of Ari going 
bear hunting without Jim. When they'd find 
any bears Ari would go up a tree and Jim 
would stand his ground and do up the bear. 
Jim. never gets excited in a scrimmage, and 
he's a dead shot. He'll stand in his tracks and 
wait for a bear, and when the brute gets near 
him he'll raise his rifle as steadily as though he 
were at a turkey shoot and put the bullet in the 
exact spot every time. If that had been the 
piebald Grizzly of the Piru that treed Ari, he 
wouldn't have scared him out of the tree." 

"What's the piebald Grizzly?" inquired Dad 
in an incredulous tone. "I never heard of no 
such bear as that." 

"Oh, you needn't think I'm lying. I wouldn't 
lie about bears," 

"How about deer ?" 

"Well, that's different. I never knew a 
hunter or any chap that likes a gun and a tramp 
in the mountains who wouldn't lie about a deer 
except Jim Bowers. He doesn't lie worth a 
cent. Why Bowers will go out after venison, 
come back without a darned thing, and then 
tell how many deer he shot at and missed. I've 
152 



A CAMPFIRE SYMPOSIUM 

known him to miss a sleeping deer at thirty 
yards and come into camp and tell all about it. 
When I do a thing like that I come back and 
lie about it. I swear I haven't seen a deer all 
day long." 

"If you told the truth/' said Dad, "wed 
hear nothing but deer stories — the missing 
kind— all night." 

"That's all right, but I'm telling about bears 
now. This bear I speak of is a big Grizzly that 
some people call Old Clubfoot. Jim Freer 
knows him better than anybody, I reckon. Jim 
got caught in a mountain fire over on the Fraz- 
ier one day, and he had to hunt for water pretty 
lively. He found a pool about five yards across 
down in a gully, and he jumped in there and 
laid down in the water. He hadn't more than 
got settled when the big piebald bear came 
tearing along ahead of the fire and plunged into 
the same pool. It was no time to be particular 
about bedfellows, and the bear lay right down 
alongside of Jim in the water. They laid there 
pretty near half an hour as sociable as old 
maids at a tea party, and neither one offered to 
touch the other. The bear kept one eye on Jim 
and Jim kept both eyes on the bear, and as 
soon as the fire had passed Jim crawled out and 
scooted for camp, leaving the Grizzly in soak." 
153 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

"Did you ever see that piebald Pinto of the 
Piru?" inquired Dad. 

"Did I ever see him? Well, I had the 
d — dest time with him I ever had in my life 
except the day I was chased by a 
spotted mountain lion on Pine Moun- 
tain. I was hunting deer over on the 
Mutaw when I saw Old Clubfoot in the 
brush and fired at him. He turned and rushed 
towards me and I had just time enough to 
get up a tree. The tree was a pinon about a 
foot thick and would have been a safe refuge 
from any other bear, and I felt all right perched 
about twenty feet from the ground. But Old 
Clubfoot is different from other bears. He's 
a persistent, wicked o'ld cuss, and would, just as 
soon sit down at the foot of a tree and starve a 
man out as hunt sheep. He came up to the 
tree, looked it all over, sized it up, and then 
stood on his hind legs and took a good hold of 
the trunk with his arms. He couldn't quite 
reach me, and at first I thought he was going 
to climb up, which made me laugh, but I didn't 
laugh long. The old bear began to shake that 
tree until it rocked like a reed in a gale, and I 
had all I could do to hold on with arms and 

154 



A CAMPFIRE SYMPOSIUM 

legs. It's a fact that he pretty nearly made me 
seasick. He shook the tree for about ten min- 
utes, and when he saw that it was a little too 
stout and that he couldn't shake me down, he 
began tearing the trunk at the base with his 
teeth and claws. The way he made the bark and 
splinters fly was something surprising. He 
gnawed about half way through, and there was 
a wicked glitter in his little green eyes as he 
stood up to take another grip on the tree. I 
saw that he'd shake me down sure that time, 
and I got ready to take the last desperate 
chance for life. Looking around, I noticed a 
barranca, or gully, twenty feet wide about a 
hundred yards away, and I determined to make 
for that. If I could reach the bank, jump across 
and get to some heavy timber on the other side, 
I would be all right. Twenty feet is a big jump 
and I knew the bear couldn't make it. It was 
doubtful if I could, but a man will do some 
astonishing things when he's at the head of a 
procession of that sort. When the Grizzly be- 
gan to shake, I took a firm hold on the big limb 
with my hands and swung clear of the trunk. 
He made that tree snap like a whip, and as it 
swayed over toward the barranca I threw my 
feet out ahead and I let go. I shot through the 

155 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

air like a stone out of a sling-, and struck the 
ground nearly fifty yards from the tree. It 
was that fifty yards that saved me, for by the 
time I had picked myself up .and started on a 
run the bear was coming hellitywhoop. I ran 
like a scared wolf and I think my momentum 
would have carried me across the barranca if 
the bank had been firm, but the earth caved 
under me as I took off for the leap, and down 
I went into the gully under a mass of loose 
earth. I reckon there was about a ton of dirt 
on top of me, and I was in danger of being 
smothered under it. I couldn't move a limb 
and I'd have passed in my chips right there and 
been reckoned among the mysterious disap- 
pearances if it hadn't been for the bear. The 
piebald Grizzly of the Piru saved my life." 

"Did he dig you out?" asked Dad, grin- 
ning. 

"That's what he did." 

"And then he ate you up, I suppose?" 

"No 1 ; I'm coming to that. The bear came 
tumbling down into the barranca on top of the 
dirt and he began to dig right away. He was 
as good as a steam paddy, and in a few mo- 
ments I was able to get a breath of air. I was 
wondering which would be the worse, smother- 
156 



A CAMPFIRE SYMPOSIUM 

ing or being- chewed up by a bear, when he 
raked the dirt off my head and I saw daylight. 
I shut my eyes, thinking I would play dead as 
a last ruse, when I heard a roar and a rush- 
There was a trembling of the ground, a dull, 
heavy shock, and I felt something warm on 
my face. At the same moment I heard a growl 
of rage and surprise from the bear and felt re- 
lieved of his weight above me. A terrific 
racket followed. As soon as I could free my- 
self from the dirt, I crawled out cautiously and 
saw a strange thing. A big black bull, the boss 
of the Mutaw ranch, had charged on the 
Grizzly and knocked him over just in time to 
save me. One of his horns had gored the bear's 
neck, and it was the warm blood that I felt on 
my face. They were old enemies, each bore 
scars of wounds inflicted by the other, and 
they were having a battle royal down there in 
the barranca." 

"Which licked?" inquired Dad, eagerly. 

"I don't know. I'd had enough bear fight 
for one day, and I lit out for camp and left 
them clawing and charging and tearing up the 
ground. I didn't see any necessity for remain- 
ing as referee of that scrimmage. You re- 
member, father, that I came into camp covered 
157 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

with blood, and that you thought I had been 
monkeying with a mountain lion." 

"Ye-es, I recollect the circumstances, but I 
never heard about the bear and bull episode 
before. I seem to have sort of a dim notion that 
you were packing a deer home on your back 
and fell into a barranca with it and lost it in 
a mud slough, but perhaps I'm mistaken. You 
forgot to tell me the facts, I guess." 

"Shouldn't wonder," said Dad; "Joe does 
sometimes forget to tell the facts, but he 
wouldn't lie about a bear." 

"I haven't forgotten the facts about your 
bear trap in Sonoma," retorted Joe. 

"I allow that little accident never lost any- 
thing by your telling. 'Taint worth telling 
nohow. You'd better turn in and go to sleep 
and not be telling durn lies about folks that's 
old enough to be your great-grandfather, but 
ain't too old yet to give ye a licking, b'gosh ! 
Don't ye go to fergittin' that I'm a constable, 
and can arrest people who use language cal'- 
lated to provoke a breach of the peace." 

"Dad was a devil of a bear catcher," con- 
tinued Joe, "and once he built a big trap up in 
Sonoma. The door weighed about three hun- 
dred pounds, and it took two men and a crow- 
158 



A CAMPFIRE SYMPOSIUM 

bar to lift it. Dad had fixed it so that no bear 
in Sonoma could raise it from the inside. It 
was a bully trap, and when it was all finished 
Dad set the trigger and went inside to tie the 
bait on. He forgot to prop the door, and as 
soon as he monkeyed with the trigger he set it 
off and down came the door with a bang. It 
worked beautifully. 

"When Dad realized that he had caught him- 
self he was sorry he had made such a solid 
door. He couldn't think of any way of getting 
out, and there wasn't nobody within five miles. 
Dad yelled for about an hour and then quit. 
After a while he heard something coming-, and 
thinking it might be a neighbor riding along 
the trail, he shouted again. Peering out be- 
tween the logs he saw two bears in the moon- 
light making straight for the trap, and he stop- 
ped his noise. The bears came up, sniffed all 
around, smelt Dad and the bait and began 
clawing at the logs to get inside. Then Dad 
was sorry he hadn't built the trap stronger and 
used heavier logs. He tried to scare the bears 
by yelling, but the more he yelled, the harder 
they dug to get at him, and it wasn't long be- 
fore he heard a mountain lion answering his 
shout and coming nearer every minute. The 
159 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

lion came down off the mountain, jumped on 
top of the trap and began tearing- at the logs 
up there. He got his paw down through the 
trigger-hole, and Dad had to go to the other 
end of the trap to keep out of reach. Then the 
bears got the logs torn so that they could reach 
in between them, in two or three places, and 
they kept Dad on the jump inside. Before 
morning there was another lion and three more 
bears at work on the Dad-trap, and they'd have 
got him by noon that next day if a party of 
hunters hadn't come along and scared them 
away. These are the facts, but Dad used to tell 
it differently. 

"Dad said he pulled up one of the floor logs 
and began to dig with his knife and hands. He 
sunk a hole two or three feet deep and then 
run a drift under the trap to a big hollow tree 
that stood just behind it. While the bears were 
digging in, Dad was digging out. He struck 
the root of the tree with his tunnel and made an 
upraise to the inside of the trunk. He climbed 
up about ten feet and struck into a mass of 
honey and comb, and crawled through that to 
a hole about fifty feet from the ground, where 
he could look out. Just about that time the 
bears and the lions broke into the trap and be- 
160 



A CAMPFIRE SYMPOSIUM 

gan to fight over the bait. The growling and 
yelling were fearful, and the air was full of 
flying fur, bark and chips. While Dad; was 
watching the fight he heard a great scratching 
and scrambling in the tree beneath him, and he 
knew that one of the bears had caught the scent 
of the honey and was following it through his 
drift and upraise. Dad crawled out through 
the bee hole, slid down the tree and lit out for 
home. When he came back with his boys and 
neighbors he found the trap chock full of dead 
bears and lions. He cut down the bee tree, 
killed the bear that was inside and got half a 
ton of fine honey. That's the way Dad tells it." 
"I never told no such dogdurned lie as that 
since I was born," snorted Dad, "and my boys 
got me out with a crow-bar." 



161 



CHAPTER XVI. 

; j ! -.; r . i i ' j ;.. ,' 

BRAINY BEARS OF THE PECOS. 

The people who> live on the Pecos, away up 
in the canyon, almost in the afternoon shadow 
of Baldy and just this side of the Truchas 
Peaks, do not assert that the bears of that re- 
gion are wiser than the bears of any other 
country on earth, for they are ready to admit 
that in this wide world are many things con- 
cerning which they know nothing. But they 
have never heard of any bears more thoughtful 
than the bears of the Pecos, and it is doubtful 
if anybody else ever has. 

No man can associate with bears for any con- 
siderable length of time without having it im- 
pressed upon him that Ursus Americanus is 
nobody's fool. Senor Mariano Ortiz of the 
Upper Pecos affirms upon the faith of a de- 
scendant of the Conquistadores that this is so, 
and he ought to know, for he and the bears 
have been joint occupants of the ranch for 
years. There was a time when Senor Ortiz 
thought the Pecos country admirably adapted to 
162 



BRAINY BEARS OF THE PECOS 

the raising of hogs, but that was before he 
tried to raise hogs there and before he had 
learned to appreciate the mental capacities of 
bears. 

Senor Ortiz went down to Pecos town and 
bought some hogs, drove them up the river, 
and turned them, into his alfalfa field to fatten. 
They were of genuine thoroughbred razor-back 
variety, trained down to sprinting form, agile, 
self-reliant as mules, tougher than braided raw- 
hide, and disorderly in their conduct. They 
broke through the fence the first night, went up 
into a quaking asp patch where there was noth- 
ing eatable, and had a scrap with two bears 
who thought Senor Ortiz had invested in edible 
pork. The hogs were wiry and pugnacious, 
and the circumstantial evidence plainly indi- 
cated that the bears had no walk-over. How- 
ever, the bears managed to get one emaciated 
porker after a long chase, and they bit several 
samples out of him. They didn't devour the 
whole carcass, and they didn't try pork again 
for two months. 

After a few days, the hogs ceased breaking 

out of the field and settled down to the business 

of laying leaf lard upon their rugged frames, 

a line of conduct which merited and received 

163 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

the hearty approval of Don Mariano, and, as 
subsequent events proved, was joyously ap- 
preciated by the bears. Don Mariano was fear- 
ful that the bears, having- discovered the pre- 
valence of pork, would raid his field and intro- 
duce difficulties into the business of hog rais- 
ing, and he watched the drove with some solici- 
tude. But, to his surprise, he missed no pigs. 

One evening, just at dusk, Don Mariano saw 
two bears come out of the woods just above the 
alfalfa field and waddle calmly down to the 
fence. He hid behind a tree and watched them. 
When they reached the fence they stood up and 
placed their forepaws upon the top rail. Think- 
ing they were about to go a-porking, Don Mar- 
iano picked up a club and prepared to> stampede 
them, but they made no move to climb the 
fence, and he waited to see what their game 
might be. With their paws upon the rail and 
their snouts resting lazily upon their paws, like 
two old farmers discussing the crop prospects, 
the bears inspected the pigs in clover. One of 
them presently lifted a hind foot and placed it 
upon the bottom rail, and Don Mariano was 
about to break forth with a yell, when he saw 
that the bear was only getting into a more 
lazily comfortable position. Then the bear 
164 



BRAINY BEARS OF THE PECOS 

cocked his head to one side and thoughtfully 
scratched his ear. The hogs were nosing 
around in the clover, and the whole drove was 
in full view of the bears. The hogs were still 
lean and athletic. 

After contemplating the drove for about ten 
minutes, one of the bears turned about, walked 
two or three steps upright, came down to all 
fours, and, with a grunt, shambled slowly 
away. The other leisurely followed, and they 
disappeared in the woods. Now, Don Mariano 
didn't understand at the time, but he learned 
later that those bears were sizing up his hogs, 
and after inspection they had decided that there 
wasn't one in the lot fat enough to kill. 

During the next month Don Mariano saw 
bears loafing about the edge of the woods or 
lolling over his fence at least a dozen times, and 
he couldn't at all make out what they were at, 
as they did not molest his hogs. One day he 
noticed with satisfaction that the hogs were 
improving and that one youngster, who had 
attended strictly to his feed, was actually grow- 
ing fat. The bears must have caught on at 
about the same time, for that pig was missing 
the next morning. 

From that time on the alfalfa field was raid- 
165 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

ed nearly every night, and the fattest pig was 
taken every time. A five-string barb-wire 
fence proved to be no protection, and the bears 
wouldn't go near a spring gun, and so, to save 
the remnant of his drove Senor Ortiz set about 
building a stockade corral, so high that no bear 
could climb over it. It was slow work cutting, 
hauling and setting the logs, and when the 
corral was finished there was only an old sow 
left to be put into it. 

The sow soon had a litter of a dozen pigs, and 
Don Mariano fed them and saw them grow 
with satisfaction and certainty that the bears 
would not get them. When they were about 
roasting size Don Mariano looked into the cor- 
ral one morning and counted only eleven little 
pigs. The missing pig could not have got out, as 
there was no hole in the corral, and Don Mar- 
iano eyed the old sow with suspicion. Still he 
was inclined, like all good Mexican people, to 
explain inexplicable things by the simple for- 
mula : "It is the will of God/' and with a shrug 
he dismissed the mystery from his mind. 

But when he missed a second and a third 
little pig from the litter, he openly and vio- 
lently accused the old sow of devouring her 
offspring, and talked of sending down to El 
166 



BRAINY BEARS OF THE PECOS 

Macho for the Padre. He did better than that, 
however, for he isolated the old sow in a board 
pen and gave the youngsters the run of the 
corral. A day or two later another pig mys- 
teriously disappeared, and Don Mariano began 
to suspect his next door neighbor of reprehen- 
sible practices, and talked about sending for the 
constable. Upon second thought, he strung 
barb wire on the top of the stockade and set 
steel-traps cunningly outside. Then half a 
dozen little porkers were spirited away in rapid 
succession, and when Don Mariano satisfied 
himself that nobody on the Pecos had feasted 
upon roast pig since last Christmas, he con- 
cluded that the devil had a hand in the business 
for sure. 

Now, Don Mariano had been heard fre- 
quently to say that he was not afraid of the 
devil, and truly he was no idle braggart, for he 
loaded up his gun and laid in wait for him in- 
side the old sow's pen, grimly determined, if the 
devil swooped down after another pig, to take 
a shot at him flying. He felt sure of at least 
winging the satanic thief, for he had scratched 
a cross on every buckshot in the load. 

It was a moonlight night. Don Mariano lay 
upon the clean straw that he had placed in the 
167 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

old sow's pen and waited for the hour of mid- 
night, at which time, as is well known, church- 
yards yawn and devils flit about. He had 
apologized to the bereaved mother for enter- 
taining unworthy suspicions of her, and they 
were on amicable terms. Don Mariano was al- 
most dozing when he was startled broad awake 
by a familiar grunt. Peering between two of 
the posts of the stockade, he saw coming across 
the clearing, looming huge and distinct in the 
moonlight, two bears. They were headed 
straight for the corral. Don Mariano knew 
they could not climb the stockade, and he 
watched them with languid interest. But the 
corral was evidently their objective point, for 
they lumbered along right toward it. 

"Now, look at those infatuated fool bears," 
said Don Mariano to himself. "They'll get 
into one of the traps and make a grand row 
and frighten the devil away, so that I won't 
get a shot. For Dios !" 

But the two fool bears did not get into a 
trap. Without delay they clambered up into a 
large tree beside which the corral was built, 
and made their way out along a big limb that 
hung over the corral. There was no hesita- 
tion in their movements ; clearly, they had been 
168 



BRAINY BEARS OF THE PECOS 

there before. One of them, the lighter and 
more active, went well out toward the end of 
the limb, and the other advanced slowly until 
their combined weight bent the limb down over 
the top of the stockade, when the first swung 
himself off by his forepaws and dropped into 
the corral. 

"That's a very smart trick," muttered Don 
Mariano. "You are in, no doubt of that, but 
how the devil you are going to get back is 
another story/' 

The bear seized a pig in no time, and having 
broken its neck and stopped its squealing with 
a dexterous right-hander on the ear, he shuf- 
fled back to a position under the limb and 
stood upright, holding the pig in his arms. 
Then the other and heavier bear moved out 
toward the end of the limb until it bent be- 
neath his weight so that he could reach the pig 
as the lighter one held it up. The big bear took 
the pig, and the other bear seized the limb and 
drew it down until he got a firm hold with 
all four feet. Then the big bear backed away 
toward the trunk and the other followed, and 
the limb slowly sprang up to its natural level. 
The two bears backed down to the ground and 

169 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

waddled across the clearing, the big one walk- 
ing upright and carrying the pig in his arms. 

Don Mariano did not shoot. "The Good 
Father," he said, "has given brains like that 
only to such of his children as have souls. I 
would not commit murder for the value of a 
pig. Besides, I casually noticed that I had 
miraculously forgotten to put caps on the gun. 
Nevertheless I cut away all the limbs from the 
tree on the side toward the corral, and I still 
have the old sow and one pig." 



170 



CHAPTER XVII. 

WHEN MONARCH WAS FREE. 

For several years a large Grizzly roamed 
through the rugged mountains in the northern 
part of Los Angeles county, raiding cattle 
ranges and bee ranches and occasionally fall- 
ing afoul of a settler or prospector. He was 
at home on Mt. Gleason, but his forays took 
in Big Tejunga and extended for twenty or 
thirty miles along the range. Every settler 
knew the bear and had a name for him, and 
he went by as many aliases as a burglar in 
active practice. As his depredations ceased 
after the capture of Monarch in 1889, those 
who assert that Monarch was the wanderer of 
the Sierra Madre and Big Tejunga may be 
right, and some of the stories told about him 
may be true. 

Jeff Martin, a cattleman, who lived in An- 
telope Valley, and drove his stock into the 
mountains in summer, had several meetings 
with the big bear, but never managed to get the 
best of him. When the Monarch didn't win, 
171 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

the fight was a draw. Jeff had an old buck- 
skin horse that would follow a bear track as 
readily as a burro will follow a trail, and could 
be ridden up to within a few yards of the game. 
Jeff and the old buckskin met the Monarch on 
a trail and started a bear fight right away. 
The Monarch, somewhat surprised at the novel 
idea of a man disputing his right of way, stood 
upright and looked at Jeff, who raised his Win- 
chester and began working the lever with great 
industry. Jeff was never known to lie ex- 
travagantly about a bear-fight, and when he 
told how he pumped sixteen forty-four calibre 
bullets smack into the Monarch's shaggy breast 
and never "fazed" him, nobody openly doubted 
Jeff's story. 

He said the Monarch stood up and took the 
bombardment as nonchalantly as he would a 
fusilade from a pea-shooter, appearing to be 
only amazed at the cheek of the man and the 
buckskin horse. When Jeff's rifle was empty, 
he turned and spurred his horse back down the 
trail, followed by the bear, who kept up the 
chase about a mile and then disappeared in the 
brush. Jeff's theory was that the heavy mass 
of hair on the bear's breast effectually protected 
him from the bullets, which do not have great 
172 



WHEN MONARCH WAS FREE 

penetrating power when fired from a forty- four 
Winchester with a charge of only forty grains 
of powder. 

About a week after that adventure the Mon- 
arch called at Martin's summer camp on Glea- 
son Mountain to get some beef. It was about 
midnight when he climbed into the corral. The 
only beef in the corral that night was on the 
bones of a tough and ugly bull, and as soon as 
the Monarch dropped to the ground from the 
fence he got into trouble. The bull was spoil- 
ing for a fight, and he charged on the bear 
without waiting for the call of time, taking him 
amidships and bowling him over in the mud 
before the Monarch knew what was coming. 
Jeff was aroused by the disturbance and went 
over to see what was up. He saw two huge 
bulks charging around in the corral, banging 
up against the sides and making the dirt fly in 
all directions, and he heard the bellowing of 
the old bull and the hoarse growls of the bear. 
They were having a strenuous time all by them- 
selves, and Jeff decided to let them fight it out 
in their own way without any interference. 
Returning to the cabin, he said to his son Jesse 
and an Indian who worked for him : "It's that 
d d old Grizzly having a racket with the 

173 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

old bull, but I reckon the bull is old enough to 
take care of himself. We'll bar the door and 
let 'em go it." 

So they barred the door and listened to the 
sounds of the battle. In less than a quarter 
of an hour the Monarch got a beautiful licking 
and concluded that he didn't want any beef for 
supper. The bull was tough, anyway, and he 
would rather make a light meal off the grub 
in the cabin. Jeff heard a great scratching and 
scrambling as the Monarch began climbing out 
of the corral. Then there was a roar and a 
rush, a heavy thud as the bull's forehead struck 
the Monarch's rear elevation, a growl of pain 
and surprise and the fall of half a ton or more 
of bear meat on the ground outside of the cor- 
ral. 

"I reckon the old bull has made that cuss 
lose his appetite," chuckled Jeff. "He won't 
come fooling around this ranch any more. I'll 
bet he's the sorest bear that ever wore hair." 

The three men in the cabin were laughing 
and enjoying the triumph of the bull when 
"whang!" came something against the door, 
and they all jumped for their guns. It was the 
discomfited but not discouraged Monarch 
breaking into the cabin in search of his supper. 
174 



WHEN MONARCH WAS FREE 

With two or three blows of his ponderous paw 
the grizzly smashed the door to splinters, but 
as he poked his head in he met a volley from 
two rifles and a shotgun. He looked at Jeff 
reproachfully for the inhospitable reception, 
turned about and went away, more in sorrow 
than in anger. 

Jeff Martin's next meeting with the Monarch 
was in the Big Tejunga. He and his son Jesse 
were hunting deer along the side of the can- 
yon, when they saw a big bear in the brush 
about a hundred yards up the hill. Both fired 
at the same moment and one ball at least hit the 
bear. Uttering a roar of pain, the grizzly snap- 
ped viciously at his shoulder where the bullet 
struck, and as he turned his head he saw the 
two hunters, who then recognized the Monarch 
by his huge bulk and grizzled front. The Mon- 
arch came with a rush like an avalanche down 
the mountain side, breaking through the man- 
zanita brush and smashing down young trees 
as easily as a man tramples down grass. His 
lowered head offered no fair mark for a bullet, 
and he came on with such speed that only a. 
chance shot could have hit him anywhere. 
Jeff and his son Jess did not try any experi- 
ments of that kind, but dropped their rifles and 
175 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

shinned up a tree as fast as they could. They 
were none too rapid, as Jeff left a piece of one 
bootleg in the Monarch's possession. The 
Monarch was not a bear to fool away much 
time on a man up a tree, and as soon as he dis- 
covered that the hunters were out of reach he 
went away and disappeared in the brush. The 
two men came down, picked up their guns and 
decided to have another shot at the Monarch 
if they could find him. They knew better than 
to go into the brush after a bear, but they 
hunted cautiously about the edges for some 
time. They were sure that the Monarch was 
still in there, but they could not ascertain at 
what point. Jeff went around to windward of 
the brush patch and set fire to it, and then 
joined Jess on the leeward side to watch for 
the reappearance of the Monarch. The wind 
was blowing fresh up the canyon and the fire 
ran rapidly through the dry brush, making a 
thick smoke and great noise. When the Mon- 
ardh came out he came rapidly and from an 
unexpected quarter, and the two hunters had 
just time enough to break for their tree again 
and get out of reach. 

This time the Monarch did not leave them. 
He sat down at the foot of the tree and watched 
176 



WHEN MONARCH WAS FREE 

with malicious patience. The wind increased 
and the fire spread on all sides, and in a few 
minutes it became uncomfortably warm up the 
tree. The bear kept on the side of the tree op- 
posite the advancing fire and waited for the 
men to come down. Jeff and Jess got a little 
protection from the heat by hugging the lee- 
ward side of the trunk, but it became evident 
that the tree would soon be in a blaze, and un- 
less they jumped and ran within the next min- 
ute or two they would be surrounded by fire 
They hoped that the Grizzly would weaken first, 
but he showed no signs of an intention to leave. 
When the flames began crawling up the wind- 
ward side of the tree and the heat became un- 
bearable, Jeff said : 

"Jess, which would you rather take chances 
on, Grizzly or fire?" 

"Dad, I think I'll chance the bear," replied 
Jess, covering his face with his arm. 

"All right. When I say go, jump and run 
as though you were scooting through hell with 
a keg of powder under your arm." 

Jeff and Jess crawled out on the limbs and 

swung by their hands for a moment, and at the 

word they dropped to the ground within ten 

feet of the bear and lit out like scared wolves. 
177 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

They broke right through the burning brush, 
getting their hair singed as they went. The 
bear started after them, but he was afraid to 
go through the fire, and while he was finding 
a way out of the circle of burning brush and 
timber, Jeff and Jess struck out down the 
mountain side, making about fifteen feet at a 
jump, and never stopped running until they got 
to the creek and out of the bear's sight. 



378 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

HOW OLD PINTO DIED. 

This is an incredible bear story, but it is 
true. George Gleason told it to a man who 
knew the bear so well that he thought the old 
Pinto Grizzly belonged to him and wore his 
brand, and as George is no bear hunter himself, 
but is a plain, ordinary, truthful person, there 
is not the slightest doubt that he related only 
the facts. George said some of the facts were 
incredible before he started in. He had never 
heard or read of such tenacity of life in any 
animal. But there are* precedents, even if 
George never heard of them. 

The vitality of the California Grizzly is as- 
tonishing, as many a man has sorrowful rea- 
son to know, and the tenacity of the Old 
Pinto's hold on life was remarkable, even 
among Grizzlies. This Pinto was a famous 
bear. His home was among the rocks and 
manzanita thickets of La Liebra Mountain, a 
limestone ridge southwest of Tehachepi that di- 
vides Gen. Beale's two ranches, Los Alamos y 
179 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

Agua Caliente and La Liebra, and his range 
was from Tejon Pass to San Emigdio. His 
regular occupation was killing Gen. Beale's 
cattle, and the slopes of the hills and the 
cienegas around Castac Lake were strewn with 
the bleached bones of his prey. For twenty 
years that solitary old bear had been monarch 
of all that Gen. Beale surveyed — to paraphrase 
President Lincoln's remark to Surveyor-Gen- 
eral Beale himself — and wrought such devas- 
tation on the ranch that for years there had 
been a standing reward for his hide. 

Men who had lived in the mountains and 
knew the old Pinto's infirmity of temper were 
wary about invading his domains, and not a 
vaquero could be induced to go afoot among the 
manzanita thickets of the limestone ridge. The 
man who thought he owned the Pinto followed 
his trail for two months many years ago and 
learned many things about him ; among others 
that the track of his hind foot measured four- 
teen inches in length and nine inches in width ; 
that the hair on his head and shoulders was 
nearly white; that he could break a steer's neck 
with a blow of his paw ; that he feared neither 
man nor his works ; that while he would invade 
a camp with leisurely indifference, he would not 
ISO 



HOW OLD PINTO DIED 

enter the stout oak-log traps constructed for 
his capture; and finally, that it would be sui- 
cide to meet him on the trail with anything less 
efficient than a Gatling gun. 

Old Juan, the vaquero, who lived in a cabin 
on the flat below the alkaline pool called Cas- 
tac Lake, was filled with a fear of Pinto that 
was akin to superstition. He told how the bear 
had followed him home and besieged him all 
night in the cabin, and he would walk five 
miles to catch a horse to ride two miles in the 
hills. To him old Pinto was "mucho diablo/' 
and a shivering terror made his eyes roll and 
his voice break in trembling whispers when he 
talked of the bear while riding along the cattle 
trails. 

Once upon a time an ambitious sportsman 
of San Francisco, who wanted to kill some- 
thing bigger than a duck and more ferocious 
than a jackrabbit, read about Pinto and per- 
suaded himself that he was bear-hunter enough 
to tackle the old fellow. He went to Fort Te- 
jon, hired a guide and made an expedition to 
the Castac. The guide took the hunter to 
Spike-buck Spring, which is at the head of a 
ravine under the limestone ridge, and showed 
to him the footprints of a big bear in the mud 
181 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

and along the bear trail that crosses the spring. 
One glance at the track of Pinto's foot was 
sufficient to dispel all the dime-novel day 
dreams of the sportsman and start a readjust- 
ment of his plan of campaign. After gazing 
at that foot-print, the slaying of a Grizzly by 
"one well-directed shot" from the "unerring 
rifle" was a feat that lost its beautiful simplicity 
and assumed heroic proportions. The man 
from San Francisco had intended to find the 
bear's trail, follow it on foot, overtake or meet 
the Grizzly and kill him in his tracks, after the 
manner of the intrepid hunters that he had read 
about, but he sat down on a, log and debated 
the matter with the guide. That old-timer 
would not volunteer advice, but when it was 
asked he gave it, and he told the man from 
San Francisco that if he wanted to tackle a 
Grizzly all by his lonely self, his best plan would 
be to stake out a calf, climb a tree and wait 
for the bear to come along in the night. 

So the man built a platform in the tree, 
about ten feet from, the ground, staked out a 
calf, climbed up to the platform and waited. 
The bear came along and killed the calf, and 
the man in the tree saw the lethal blow, heard 
the bones crack and changed his plan again. 
182 




Pinto Looked Down on the Platform 



HOW OLD PINTO DIED 

He laid himself prone upon the platform, held 
his breath and hoped fervently that his heart 
would not thump loudly enough to attract the 
bear's intention. The bear ate his fill of the 
quivering veal, and then reared on his haunches 
to survey the surroundings. The man from 
San Francisco solemnly assured the guide in 
the morning, when he got back to camp, that 
when Pinto sat up he actually looked down on 
that platform and could have walked over to 
the tree and picked him off like a ripe persim- 
mon, and he thanked heaven devoutly that it 
did not come into Pinto's head that that would 
be a good thing to do. So the man from San 
Francisco broke camp and went home with 
some new and valuable ideas about hunting 
Grizzlies, chief of which was the very clear idea 
that he did not care for the sport. 

This is the sort of bear Old Pinto was, em- 
inently entitled to the name that Lewis and 
Clark applied to his tribe — Ursus Ferox. Of 
course he was called "Old Clubfoot" and 
"Reelfoot" by people who did not know him^ 
just as every big Grizzly has been called in 
California since the clubfooted-bear myth be- 
came part of the folk lore of the Golden State, 
but his feet were all sound and whole. The 
183 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

Clubfoot legend is another story and has noth- 
ing to do with the big bear of the Castac. 

Pinto was a "bravo" and a killer, a solitary, 
cross-grained, crusty-tempered old outlaw of 
the range. What he would or might do under 
any circumstances could not be predicated upon 
the basis of what another one of his species 
had done under similar circumstances. The 
man who generalizes the conduct of the Griz- 
zly is liable to serious error, for the Grizzly's in- 
dividuality is strong and his disposition var- 
ious. Because one Grizzly scuttled into the 
brush at the sight of a man, it does not follow 
that another Grizzly will behave similarly. The 
other Grizzly's education may have been differ- 
ent. One bear lives in a region infested only 
by small game, such as rabbits, wood-mice, 
ants and grubs, and when he cannot get a meal 
by turning over flat rocks or stripping the bark 
from a decaying tree, he digs roots for a living. 
He is not accustomed to battle and he is not a 
killer, and he may be timorous in the presence 
of man. Another Grizzly haunts the cattle or 
sheep ranges and is accustomed to seeing men 
and beasts flee before him for their lives. He 
lives by the strong arm, takes what he wants 
like a robber baron, and has sublime confidence 
184 



HOW OLD PINTO DIED 

in his own strength, courage and agility. He 
has killed bulls in single combat, evaded the 
charge of the cow whose calf he has caught, 
stampeded sheep and their herders. He is al- 
most exclusively carnivorous and consequently 
fierce. Such a bear yields the trail to nothing 
that lives. That is why Old Pinto was a bad 
bear. 

So long as Pinto remained in his dominions 
and confined his maraudings to the cattle 
ranges, he was reasonably safe from the hunt- 
ers and perfectly safe from the settler and his 
strychnine bottle, but for some reasons of his 
own he changed his habits and his diet and 
strayed over to San Emigdio for mutton. Per- 
haps, as he advanced in years, the bear found 
it more difficult to catch cattle, and having dis- 
covered a band of sheep and found it not only 
easy to kill what he needed, but great fun to 
charge about in the band and slay right and 
left in pure wanton ferocity, he took up the 
trade of sheep butcher. For two or three years 
he followed the flocks in their summer grazing 
over the vast, spraddling mesas of Pine Moun- 
tain, and made a general nuisance of himself 
in the camps. There have been other bears on 
Pine Mountain, and the San Emigdio flocks 
185 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

have been harassed there regularly, but no 
such bold marauder as Old Pinto ever struck 
the range. Other bears made their forays in 
the night and hid in the ravines during the 
day, but Pinto strolled into the camps at all 
hours, charged the flocks when they were graz- 
ing and stampeded Haggin and Carr's mer- 
inos all over the mountains. 

The herders, mostly Mexicans, Basques and 
Portuguese, found it heart-breaking to gather 
the sheep after Pinto had scattered them, and 
moreover they were mortally afraid of the big 
Grizzly and took to roosting on platforms in 
the trees instead of sleeping in their tents at 
night. Worse than all else, the bear killed their 
dogs. The men were instructed by the boss of 
the camp to let the bear alone and keep out of 
his way, as they were hired to herd sheep and 
not to fight bears, but the dogs could not be 
made to understand such instructions and per- 
sisted in trying to protect their woolly wards. 

The owners were accustomed to losing a few 
hundred sheep on Pine Mountain every sum- 
mer, and figured the loss in the fixed charges, 
but when Pinto joined the ursine band that fol- 
lowed the flocks for a living, the loss became 
serious and worried the majordomo at the 
186 



HOW OLD PINTO DIED 

home camp. So another reward was offered for 
the Grizzly's scalp and the herders were in- 
structed to notify the Harris boys at San 
Emigdio whenever the bear raided their flocks. 

Here is where Gleason's part of the story 
begins. The bear attacked a band of sheep one 
afternoon, killed four and stampeded the Mexi- 
can herder, who ran down the mountain to the 
camp of the Harris boys, good hunters who 
had been engaged by the majordomo to do up 
Old Pinto. Two of the Harris boys and an- 
other man went up to the scene of the raid, 
carrying their rifles, blankets and some boards 
with which to construct a platform. They se- 
lected a pine tree and built a platform across 
the lower limbs about twenty feet from the 
ground. When the platform was nearly com- 
pleted, two of the men left the tree and went to 
where they had dropped their blankets and 
guns, about a hundred yards away. One 
picked up the blankets and the other took the 
three rifles and started back toward the tree, 
where the third man was still tinkering the 
platform. 

The sun had set, but it was still twilight, 
and none of the party dreamed of seeing the 
bear at that time, but within forty yards of the 

187 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

tree sat Old Pinto, his head cocked to one side, 
watching the man in the tree with much evi- 
dent interest. Pinto had returned to his mut- 
tons, but founu the proceedings of the man up 
the tree so interesting that he was letting his 
supper wait. 

The man carrying the blankets dropped them 
and seized a heavy express rifle that some Eng- 
lishman had left in the country. The other 
man dropped the extra gun and swung a Win- 
chester 45-70 to his shoulder. The express 
cracked first, and the hollow-pointed ball struck 
Pinto under the shoulder. The 45-70 bullet 
struck a little lower and made havoc of the 
bear's liver. The shock knocked the bear off 
his pins, but he recovered and ran into a thicket 
of scrub oak. The thicket was impenetrable to 
a man, and there was no man present who 
wanted to penetrate it in the wake of a wound- 
ed Grizzly. 

The hunters returned to their camp, and 
early next morning they came back up the 
mountain with three experienced and judicious 
dogs. They had hunted bears enough to know 
that Pinto would be very sore and ill-tempered 
by that time, and being men of discretion as 
well as valor, they had no notion of trying to 
188 




Watcning the Man in the Tree 



HOW OLD PINTO DIED 

follow the dogs through the scrub oak brush. 
Amateur hunters might have sent the dogs 
into the brush and remained on the edge of the 
thicket to await developments, thereby involv- 
ing themselves in difficulties, but these old pro- 
fessionals promptly shinned up tall trees when 
the dogs struck the trail. The dogs roused 
the bear in less than two minutes, and there 
was tumult in the scrub oak. Whenever the 
men in the trees caught a glimpse of the Griz- 
zly they fired at him, and the thud of a bullet 
usually was followed by yells and fierce growl- 
ings, for the bear is a natural sort of a beast 
and always bawls when he is hurt very badly. 
There is no affectation about a Grizzly, and he 
never represses the instinctive expression of his 
feelings. Probably that is why Bret Har^ 
calls him "coward of heroic size," but L 
never was very intimately acquainted with a 
marauding old ruffian of the range. 

The hunters in the trees made body shots 
mostly. Twice during the imbroglio in the 
brush the bear sat up and exposed his head 
and the men fired at it, but as he kept wrang- 
ling with the dogs, they thought they missed. 
This is the strange part of the story, for some 
of the bullets passed through the bear's head 

189 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

and did not knock him out. One Winchester 
bullet entered an eye-socket and traversed the 
skull diagonally, passing through the forward 
part of the brain. A Grizzly's brain-pan is long 
and narrow, and a bullet entering the eye from 
directly in front will not touch it. Wherefore 
it is not good policy to shoot at the eye of a 
charging Grizzly. Usually it is equally futile 
to attempt to reach his brain with a shot be- 
tween the eyes, unless the head be in such a 
position that the bullet will strike the skull at 
a right angle, for the bone protecting the brain 
in front is from two and a half to three inches 
thick, and will turn the ordinary soft bullet. 
One of the men did get a square shot from his 
perch at Pinto's forehead, and the 45-70-450 
bullet smashed his skull. 

The shot that ended the row struck at the 
"butt" of the Grizzly's ear and passed through 
the base of the brain, snuffing out the light of 
his marvelous vitality like a candle. 

Then the hunters came down from their 
roosts, cut their way into the thicket and ex- 
amined the dead giant. Counting the two shots 
fired the night before, one of which had nearly 
destroyed a lung, there were eleven bullet 
holes in the bear, and his skull was so shattered 
190 



HOW OLD PINTO DIED 

that the head could not be saved for mounting. 
Only two or three bullets had lodged in the 
body, the others having passed through, mak- 
ing large, ragged wounds and tearing the inter- 
nal organs all to pieces. 

The skin, which weighed over one hundred 
pounds, was taken to Bakersfield, and the meat 
that had not been spoiled by bullets was cut 
up and sold to butchers and others. Estimat- 
ing the total weight from the portions that were 
actually tested on the scales, the butchers fig- 
ured that Pinto weighed noo pounds. The 
1800 and 2000-pound bears have all been 
weighed by the fancy of the men who killed 
them, and the farther away they have been from 
the scales the more they have weighed. 

There is no other case on record of a bear 
that continued fighting with a smashed skull 
and pulped brains, although possibly such cases 
may have occurred and never found their way 
into print. Gleason saw Old Pinto shortly af- 
ter the fight and examined the head, and there 
is no reason to doubt his description of the ef- 
fect of the bullets. 



191 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THREE IN A BOAT. 

The Cascade Mountains in Oregon and 
Washington Territory are full of bears, and as 
the inhabitants seldom hunt them, the animals 
are disposed to be sociable and neighborly and 
wander about close to the settlements. Harry 
Dumont and Rube Fields had a very sociable 
evening with a black bear at the Upper Cas- 
cades on the Columbia some years ago. They 
were crossing in a boat above the falls, when 
Dumont, sitting in the stern, pointed out what 
he said was a deer, swimming the river, about a 
hundred yards away. Rube bent to the oars 
and pulled towards the head that could just be 
seen on the water, intending to give Dumont a 
chance to knock the deer on the skull with a 
paddle and tow the venison ashore. When the 
bow of the boat ran alongside the head the sup- 
posed deer reached up, Caught hold of the boat 
and clambered aboard without ceremony. It 
was a black bear of ordinary size, but it was 
large enough to make two men think twice be- 

192 



THREE IN A BOAT 

fore attacking it with oars. The bear quietly 
settled himself on the seat in the bow of the 
boat and looked apprehensively at the men, 
who were so astonished that they did not know 
whether to jump overboard or prepare for a 
fight. As the bear made no hostile movement 
they decided not to pick a quarrel. The boat 
meanwhile had drifted down stream and got 
into swift water, and Rube Fields saw that he 
must row for all he was worth to avoid go- 
ing over the falls, which would be sure death. 
The bear seemed to realize the danger and act- 
ed as though he was uncertain whether it were 
better to stay aboard or take to the water again. 
"Pull ! pull for the shore !" urged Dumont, in 
a hoarse whisper, and Rube bent to the oars 
with all his muscle^ glancing nervously over his 
shoulder at the silent passenger in the bow. The 
bear kept one eye suspiciously on the men and 
the other on the distant shore, and gave every 
indication of great perturbation of spirit. It 
was a hard pull to get the heavily-laden boat 
out of the current, but Rube finally accomplish- 
ed it and rowed into' safer water. He hoped 
that the bear would slide overboard and aban- 
don the boat, as it made him nervous to have 
such a passenger behind him, and it was awk- 
193 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

ward rowing with his head turned over his 
shoulder all the time. He suggested to Du- 
mont that they make a rush for the bear and 
pitch him out, but Dumont declined and told 
him to pull ashore as fast as he could. Rube 
pulled, and as soon as the boat's prow grated 
on the sand, the bear made a hasty and awk- 
ward plunge over the side, scrambled up the 
bank with his head cocked over his shoulder 
to see if there was any pursuit, and galloped 
away into the woods in evident fear. 

Rube Fields wiped the perspiration from his 
brow with his forearm and fervently said, 
"Thank the Lord !" 

Dumont gazed after the galloping bear and 
murmured, "Wellibedam !" 



194 



CHAPTER XX. 

A PROVIDENTIAL PROSPECT HOLE. 

One-eyed Zeke, who hunted for a living 
along Owen River, in Inyo County, CaL, in the 
early seventies, claimed to have a method of 
killing bears that might be effective if a man 
had nerve enough to work it and a gun that 
never missed fire. He carried a revolver and 
a heavy double-barrelled shotgun, but never a 
rifle, and when he saw a Grizzly he said he 
opened on him with the six-shooter and plug- 
ged him often enough to leave the bear in no 
doubt as to the source of the annoyance. Stand- 
ing in plain view with the heavily-loaded shot- 
gun ready, he awaited the charge, and at close 
quarters turned loose both barrels into the 
bear's chest. 

That sounds like a plausible scheme. The 
heavy charges of shot at close range smash the 
Grizzly's interior works in a deplorable man- 
ner and he dies right away. But only a few 
men have the nerve to face a big ugly bear in 
full charge and reserve fire until he is within 
195 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

two yards of the muzzle of the gun. One-eyed 
Zeke and a celebrated hunter of the Bad Lands 
are the only men I have known who professed 
to have acquired the habit of hunting the Griz- 
zly in such a fashion, and the celebrated Bad 
Lands ranchman did his killing with a rifle 
and always shot for the eye, which was the 
more remarkable because he was very near- 
sighted and wore eyeglasses. 

Zeke once met a bear in the mountains near 
Owen Lake and played his customary game, 
but not with complete success. By some ex- 
traordinary bad luck both cartridges in his gun 
had defective primers, and when he pulled the 
triggers he was very much pained and disap- 
pointed by the absence of the usual loud report. 
It was a critical moment for Zeke. It took him 
the thousandth part of a second to grasp the 
situation and spring desperately to the right. 
Another small fraction of a second was con- 
sumed in his unexpected descent to the bottom 
of an old prospect hole that was overgrown 
with brush and had escaped his notice. 

Probably that was the only prospect hole in 
that part of the Sierra Nevada, and it must 
have been dug by some half-cracked Forty- 
niner like Marshall, who prospected all the way 
196 



A PROVIDENTIAL PROSPECT HOLE 

from Yuma to the Columbia. Zeke vows it 
was dug by Providence. 

The sudden and unaccountable disappear- 
ance of the man with a gun surprised the bear, 
and he had thrown himself forward and 
plunged into the chaparral several yards before 
he began to catch on to the fact that Zeke was 
not before him. As soon as Zeke struck bot- 
tom, he looked up to see if the bear was com- 
ing down too, and then he removed the bad 
cartridges and quickly inserted two more in his 
gun. He knew the bear would smell him out 
very soon. 

In half a minute the bear's snout appeared 
at the top of the hole. It disappeared and was 
at once replaced by the bear's hind legs. Caleb 
was coming down stern foremost after the nox- 
ious person who had fired bullets at him. As 
the bear scrambled down, Zeke aimed just un- 
der his shoulder and sent two handsful of 
buckshot careering through his vitals in a diag- 
onal line. The wound was almost instantly 
fatal, and the bear came down in a heap at the 
bottom of the hole, which was about ten or 
twelve feet deep. 

The excitement being over, Zeke realized 
that he had been injured in the fall, and that 
197 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

standing up was painful. He sat down on the 
bear to rest and reflect, and to induce reflection 
he took out his pipe and lighted it. The flare oi 
the match lighted up the prospect hole, and 
Zeke was interested on seeing- a good-sized rat- 
tlesnake lying dead under his feet, its head 
crushed by his boot heel. He had landed on 
the snake when he fell in the hole, and the 
slipping of his foot sprained the ankle. 

Zeke had a hard time climbing out of the 
prospect hole and getting back to camp, but he 
got there and sent some men up to hoist the 
bear to the surface. The Grizzly's weight was 
estimated to be 900 pounds, and it grew every 
time Zeke told the story until the last time I 
heard it, when it was just short of a ton. 

* * * 

Zeke's bear-killing exploits with a scatter 
gun may be classed with the "important if 
true" information of the newspapers, but there 
is at least one authentic instance of the killing 
of a grizzly with a charge of bird shot. 

Dr. H. W. Nelson, who was in later years 

a prominent surgeon of Sacramento, practiced 

medicine in Placer county, Cal., in the early 

fifties and was something of a sportsman. He 

198 



A PROVIDENTIAL PROSPECT HOLE 

was 'out quail shooting one day with a double 
shotgun and was making his way up a ravine 
in a narrow trail much choked with chaparral, 
when some men on the hill above him shouted 
to him that a wounded bear was coming down 
the ravine and warned him to get out of the 
way. The sides of the ravine were too steep 
to be climbed, and the noise made by the bear 
breaking the brush told him that it was too 
late to attempt to escape by running. So the 
doctor cocked his gun, backed into the chaparral 
as far as he could and hoped the bear might 
pass him without seeing him. 

In another moment the Grizzly broke through 
the brush with a full head of steam directly at 
the doctor, and the bear's snout was within 
three feet of the muzzle of the gun when the 
doctor instinctively pulled both triggers. The 
two charges of small shot followed the nasal 
passage and caved in the front of the bear's 
skull, killing him instantly, but the animal's 
momentum carried him forward, and he and 
the doctor went down together. The doctor 
suffered no injury from the bear's teeth or 
claws, but was bruised by the shock of the col- 
lision and the fall. 



199 



CHAPTER XXI. 

KILLED WITH A BOWIE. 

The favorite weapon of the bear hunter of 
the old time Wild West story book was the 
bowie, and doughty deeds he used to do with 
it in hand-to-claw encounters with monstrous 
Grizzlies. 

It was the fashion in those days for bears to 
stand erect and wrestle catch-as-catch-can, try- 
ing to get the under-hold and hug the hunter 
to death, and the hunter invariably stepped in 
and plunged his bowie to the hilt in the heart 
of his foe. But the breed of Grizzly that hug- 
ged and the type of hunter who slew with the 
knife became extinct so long ago that no speci- 
mens can be found in these days. 

I have known many bear slayers, but never 
one who would say that he ever did or would 
deliberately attack a Grizzly with a knife, or 
that he should expect to survive if forced to 
defend himself with such a weapon. Neither 
did I ever hear of a Grizzly that tried to kill a 
man by hugging him. 

200 



KILLED WITH A BOWIE 

The only case of successful use of the bowie 
in defence against a Grizzly that seemed to be 
well authenticated, among all the stories I 
heard from hunters, was that of Jim Wilburns' 
fight in Trinity. Wilburn was a noted hunter 
and mountaineer of Long Ridge, and he had 
the scars to show for proof of the story. His 
left arm was crippled, the hand curled up like a 
claw, and the end of a broken bone made an 
ugly knob on his wrist. On his scalp were two 
deep scars extending from his forehead almost 
to the nape of his neck. 

Wilburn had chased a big Grizzly into the 
brush and was unable to coax him out where he 
could get a shot at the beast. An Indian of- 
fered to go in and prospect for bear, and dis- 
appeared in the thicket. His search was suc- 
cessful, but perhaps it was a question whether 
he found the bear or the bear found him. The 
Indian came out of the thicket at a sprinting 
gait with the bear a good second, and they 
came so suddenly that even Jim Wilburn was 
taken by surprise. In two more jumps the 
bear would have been on top of the Indian, but 
Jim sprang between them, rifle in hand. 

Before he could fire, the weapon was 
wrenched from his hands and broken like a 
201 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

reed. He grabbed his pistol, and that was 
knocked out of his hand in a jiffy. Then the 
bear closed on him and both went down, the 
bear on top. The first thing the bear did was 
to try to swallow Jim's head, but it was a large 
head and made more than a mouthful. The 
bear's long upper teeth slipped along the skull, 
ploughing great furrows in Jim's scalp, while 
the lower teeth lacerated his face. 

Before the bear could make another grab at 
his head, Jim thrust his left fist down the ani- 
mal's throat and kept it there while the Griz- 
zly chewed his arm into pulp. Meanwhile he 
had got hold of his big knife and plunged it 
into the bear's side with all his strength. Again 
he tried to stab his enemy, but the knife did 
not penetrate the hide, and he discovered that 
in the first thrust the knife had struck a rib and 
the point was turned up. 

The bear clawed and chawed, and Jim felt 
around for the wound he had made first. When 
he found it he thrust the knife in and worked 
it around in a very disquieting way. In the 
struggle the knife slipped out of the hole sev- 
eral times, and once Jim lost it, but he persis- 
tently searched for the hole when he recovered 
the knife and prospected for the bear's vitals. 



KILLED WITH A BOWIE 

At last he worked the blade well into the 
Grizzly's interior and made such havoc by turn- 
ing it around that the brute gave up the fight 
and rolled over dead, with Jim's mangled left 
arm in his jaws. 

It was a tough fight and a close call and old 
Jim was laid up in his cabin for many a day 
afterward. 



203 



CHAPTER XXII. 

A DENFUL OF GRIZZLIES. 

A man from San Gabriel Canyon came into 
Los Angeles and told bear stories to the Pro- 
fessor and the Professor told them to other 
people. The main point of the man's tale was 
that he had found a den inhabited by two 
Grizzlies of great size and fierce aspect. He 
had seen the bears and was mightily afraid of 
them, and he wanted somebody to go up there 
and exterminate them so that he might work 
his mining claim unmolested and unafraid. The 
Professor, being guileless and confiding, be- 
lieved the tale, and he tried to oblige the bear- 
haunted miner by promoting an expedition of 
extermination. Seventeen men replied to his 
overtures with the original remark that they 
"Hadn't lost any bears." Since 1620 that has 
been the standard bear joke of the North 
American continent, and its immortality proves 
that it was the funniest thing that ever was 
said. 

At last the Professor found a man who did 

204 



A DENFUL OF GRIZZLIES 

not know the joke, and that man straightway 
consented to go to the rescue of the bear-be- 
leaguered denizen of San Gabriel Canyon. He 
and three others went into the mountains with 
guns loaded for bear, which was an error of 
judgment — they should have been loaded for 
the tellers of bear tales. An expedition prop- 
el ly outfitted to hunt bear liars rather than 
bear lairs could load a four-horse wagon with 
game in the San Gabriel Canyon. 

Old Bill, who had lived in the canyon many 
years, sorrowfully admitted that the canyon's 
reputation for harboring persons of unim- 
peachable veracity was not what it should be. 
The man-who-was-afraid-of-bears could not be 
depended upon to give bed-rock facts about 
bears, but he, Old Bill, was a well of truth in 
that line and had some good horses and burros 
to let to bear hunters. He, Old Bill, had 
killed many bears in the canyon, but had left 
enough to provide entertainment for other 
hunters. His last bear killing was heaps of fun. 
He ran across three in a bunch, shot one, 
drowned another in the creek, and jumped upon 
the third, and "just stomped him to death." 
As for the man up the creek, who pretended to 
have found a den of bears, he had been tell- 

205 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

ing that story for so many years that he prob- 
ably believed it, but nobody else did. The man 
up the creek had the nerve to pretend that his 
favorite pastime was fighting Grizzlies with a 
butcher knife, and anybody acquainted with 
bears ought to size up that sort of a man easy 
enough, said Old Bill. 

The man up the creek, the original locator of 
the denful of Grizzlies, had his opinion of Old 
Bill as a slayer of bears. It was notorious in 
the canyon that the only bear Old Bill ever 
saw was a fifty-pound cub that stole a string 
of trout from under Bill's nose, waded the 
creek and went away while Old Bill was throw- 
ing his gun into the brush and hitching fran- 
tically along a fallen spruce under the impres- 
sion that he was climbing a tree. As for him- 
self, he was getting too old and rheumatic to 
hunt, but he had had a little sport with, bears 
in his time. He recalled with especial glee a 
little incident of ten or a dozen years ago. He 
had been over on the Iron Fork hunting for a 
stray mule, and he was coming back through 
the canyon after dark. It was darker than a 
stack of black cats in the canyon, and when he 
bumped up against a bear in the trail he couldn't 
see to get in his favorite knife play — a slash to 

206 



A DENFUL OF GRIZZLIES 

the left and a back-handed cut to the right, 
severing the tendons of both front paws — and 
so he made a lunge for general results, and then 
shinned up a sycamore tree. To his great sur- 
prise he heard the bear scrambling up the tree 
behind him, and he crawled around to the other 
side of the trunk and straddled a big branch in 
the fork, where he could get a firm seat and 
have the free use of his right arm. He could 
just make out the dark bulk of the bear as the 
beast crawled clumsily up the slanting trunk in 
front of him, and as the bear's left arm came 
around and clasped the trunk, he chopped at it 
with his heavy knife. The bear roared with 
pain. Instantly he lunged furiously at the bear's 
body just under the arm pit, driving the knife 
to the hilt two or three times, and with a moan 
the beast let go all holds and fell heavily to the 
ground. 

For a minute all was silent. Then the 
growling began again, and he heard the 
scratching of claws upon the tree. In another 
moment the dark bulk of the bear appeared 
again in front of him, and again he drove the 
knife to the hilt into his body and felt the hot 
blood spurt over his hand. Clawing, scratch- 
ing and yelling, the bear slid back down the tree 

207 



BEARS I HAVE MET 

and bumped heavily on the ground, but in a 
moment resumed the attack and climbed the 
tree as quickly as if he were fresh and un- 
wounded. 

The man up the tree was puzzled to account 
for such remarkable vitality and perseverance, 
but he braced himself for the combat, and at 
the proper moment chopped viciously at the 
bear's forearm and felt the blade sink into the 
bone. This time he got in three good hard 
lunges under the arm, and when the bear fell 
"ker-flop" he had no doubt that the fight was 
ended. 

But there never was another such bear as 
that one. It wasn't a minute before the whole 
thing had to be done over again, and the man 
up the tree varied the performance by reaching 
around and giving the bear a whack in the neck 
that nearly cut his head off. This sort of thing 
was repeated at intervals for two or three 
hours, but at last the attacks ceased, and all was 
still at the foot of the tree. The man was 
weary, and to tell the truth a little rattled. He 
did not deem it wise to come off his perch and 
take any chance of trouble on the ground, so he 
strapped himself to the branch with his belt and 
fell asleep. 

208 



A DENFUL OF GRIZZLIES 

It was gray dawn when he awoke. He rub- 
bed his eyes and looked down at the ground. 
Then he rubbed them again and pinched him- 
self and glanced around at the rocks and trees 
to make sure that he was not in a trance. He 
said to himself, being a reader of the poets, 
"Can such things be, or is visions about?" 

It was no dream and the man up the canyon 
said it was no lie. Lying about the foot of the 
sycamore were nine dead bears, weltering in 
their gore. 

Which explains why the Don and the Col- 
onel and the rest of the expedition of exter- 
mination returned forthwith to Los Angeles 
without having seen a bear. There are no more 
bears. The man up the canyon killed them ail 
years ago. 



209 



Price 50 Cents 



BEARS 

I Have Met 
— arid Others 



Allen Kelly 




ILLUSTRATIONS BY 

Ernest Thompson Seton, W. H. Loomis, Homer Daven 
port, Walt. McDougall, Charles Nelan, 
|^ W. Hofacker, Will. Chapin 

and the Author 



DREXEL BIDDLE, PUBLISHER, 

PHILADELPHIA 
1903 



